THE INDIAN'S SIDE 

OF THE 

INDIAN QUESTION 



BY 

/ 

WILLIAM BARROWS DD 

Author of 

" Oregon : the Struggle for Possession :" 
"The United States of Yesterday and of To-morrow:" 
and others. 



Haec mea sunt : veteres migrate coloni 
— Virg. Ecl. IX. 




BOSTON 
D LOTHROP COMPANY 

FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STS. 



Copyright, 1887, 
By Lucy Adams Barrows. 



V>1 
.BZl 



Electrotyped 
By C. J. Peters and Sox, Boston. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Serious trifling with the Indian question 
seems to be coming to a close. The "nations" 
of colonial times, and the " high contracting 
parties " whom the Republic met as apparent 
equals during its first ninety years, have come 
down to draw rations under the drum-beat, jor 
to be blanketed and continental tramps. In 
the last analysis of the Indian, in Congress 
and on the border, he is discovered to be simply 
a man, and more or less like all Americans ; 
and the recent and so far final proposition is 
to treat him as an American. In coming to 
this we have had a tedious, annoying, nugatory, 
and mortifying series of theories, experiments, 
and makeshifts. Meanwhile, there has been an 
apparent decline in their numbers, from the 
highest official maximum, of " about 300,000," 
in 1872, to 259,244 in 1885. 

We are now entering an era of hope for the 
Indian, under the Dawes Bill; and though he 
is at first to have a qualified citizenship in 
passing out of the state of a ward, his rights 
are not to be abridged on account of race or 

3 



4 



INTRODUCTION. 



previous condition. But as all rights, privi- 
leges, and immunities do not, practically, come 
directly to one out of the Constitution and 
Statutes of the United States, but are filtered 
to him with more or less freedom and purity 
through the surrounding community, and as 
the success of this bill lies with the border 
whites, it has been thought best to mark off, 
historically, the leading and constant obstacles 
heretofore to Indian civilization. Hence this 
unpretending treatise. Only official documents 
are used to give it force. 

Xo law is self-operating ; somebody must use 
it favorably, if the subject of it has its advan- 
tages ; and intermeddling opponents must be 
held in check by hands friendly to the end of 
the law. Hitherto statute provisions for the 
Indians, and often wise and good, have been 
made powerless by a third party intervening 
between the government and the Indians — 
interested, scheming, self-seeking white men, 
on the border and in Washington. There was 
once a white border belt, poorly civilized, and 
with many in it decivilized, but now, interpen- 
etrating and commingling, these men have 
quite destroyed border-lines. 

Hitherto the work of the general government 
and of benevolent organizations, in the lines of 
education and of religion, has been thwarted 



INTRODUCTION. 



5 



by white men quite reckless of both civil and 
moral restraints. This has been a constant 
force, both at Washington and among the Ind- 
ians, hindering their civilization. Greed for 
Indian lands, miserable white neighborhood 
life, and base passion have been the constant 
enemy of Indian elevation, and have often 
added to his barbarism and profligacy. More- 
over, the average sentiment west of the Mis- 
sissippi concerning the Indian is that he is a 
worthless remnant of his race, and incapable 
of. elevation to the average American grade: 
and it is no harsh judgment to express that 
the two-thirds of our domain thus indicated 
would greatly prefer a civil and moral quaran- 
tine between them and an Indian community 
— the breadth of a State or Territory. This 
is the gentler wajr with some of saying that 
the best Indian is a dead Indian. I once saw 
an unpopular candidate carry, as with a whirl- 
wind, a doubtful campaign in Colorado, under 
the popular war-cry, " The Ute must go ! " 

Now, however high-toned and humane a bill 
may be which gains the assent of Congress, 
the administration of it for the wards of the 
nation must look for its force and temper and 
fidelity in the regions bordering on the Indian 
reservations and ranges. A law enacted on 
the Potomac is still subject to the veto of local 



6 



INTRODUCTION. 



option on the Columbia or Missouri or Colo- 
rado. Climate does not more inevitably and 
irresistibly modify the human constitution, 
when one removes from the land of his na- 
tivity, than does the popular will the working 
efficiency of a United States law perfectly con- 
stitutional, which has started off from the halls 
of Congress. 

Our failures in the Indian policies for a 
century have not come so much from the lack 
of fair legislation. We have had good laws 
enough for ends sought. Nor have the failures 
come so much from the quality of this unfortu- 
nate race as if it were effete, worthless, and 
impossible of elevation. The ends sought by 
the law have not been desired in those sections 
of the country where the law must be adminis- 
tered, and by the people who must administer i 
it. This has heretofore been the point of fatal 
weakness in our government policy for the 
aborigines. Our first chapter in this book is 
painfully abundant with evidence on this point. I 

The Dawes Bill opens a new era in this 
branch of our national work, and it is beyond 
doubt the best thing possible in the line of the 
government, so far as it goes. It embodies a 
discovery, which has cost the expensive and 
sad experiments of two centuries, that the 
Indian must be made and treated as an Amer- 



INTKODUCTION. 



7 



ican citizen. It, however, does not contem- 
plate the removal or neutralization of the 
force which has made the most of our pre- 
ceding laws and labors fruitless. In the di- 
agnosis of this great national infirmity or 
malady, the main cause has been assigned to 
the red man, and the medicines have been 
given to him. Perhaps the bill goes as far as 
the government can go in its side of the work. 
What remains to make the new era a success- 
ful one, the people must do. 

In the regions more intimately affected by 
the Indian question, there is need of introduc- 
ing a civil, social, and moral constabulary — a 
picket-line of principles and of sentiments, 
which will constrain a superior neighbor to be 
a good one to an inferior neighbor. The decla- 
ration of now almost seventy years, made by 
the venerable and Christian Cherokee in Geor- 
gia, is yet to be disproved : " No Cherokee or 
white man with a Cherokee family can possi- 
bly live among such white people as will first 
settle this country." 

A grand opportunity is now offered by this 
bill to solve the Indian question by saving the 
Indian race ; Congress gives the chance, and 
the people must do the work. Here appears 
one of the choicest features of our govern- 
ment, that under the protecting approbation 



INTRODUCTION. 



of law the people may crown our civilization 
with the associated philanthropies and charities 
and beatitudes. These do not come of legisla- 
tive enactment, nor are they established by 
majority vote. The bill opens the way, and 
waits for the arrival, on the interior plains 
and rivers and mountains of our country, of 
the sacrifice, and romance, and heroism, and 
humane and Christian devotion, which we have 
so nobly bestowed on the Ganges and Euphrates, 
and the wilds of Africa, and the islands of the 
sea. 

William Barrows. 

Reading, Mass., November, 1887. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE INDIAN AND HIS WHITE NEIGHBORS. 

Section I. — Good Old Colony Times .... 13 

II. — Another Side of the Indian Question, 22 

III. — How Much Can the Government Do ? 33 

IV. — The Army and the Indian .... 44 

V. — The Courts as Protectors of the Indian 

Rights 48 

VI. — Encouragement lies in Broader Work, 51 
CHAPTER H. 

THE CHEROKEE EXPERIMENT. THE RESERVATION 
SYSTEM A FAILURE. 

Section I. — Indian Farmers among White Far- 
mers . 56 

II. — Mixed Society ; The Civilizing In- 
dian ; The Wild Indian; The 
Hostile White Man 61 

9 



10 



CONTENTS. 



Section EH. — Indian Civilization Adjourned . . 66 

IY. — Indian Civilization Fatally Struck . 68 

V. — Border White Men Superior to the 

United States 72 

VI. — The Sad Journey of Sixteen 

Thousand into Exile 74 

VII. — Another Morning Overclouded . 76 

VIII. — Forebodings, and the Doom of the 

Reservation Theory 81 

CHAPTER HI. 

INDIAN FARMING. 

Section I. — Some Very Singular Assumptions . 86 

II. — Early Indian Farming in New Eng- 
land, New York, Missouri, New 
Mexico, Georgia, Canada, Michi- 
gan, Iowa, Florida, Minnesota, 
Dakota 89 

HE. — The Best Indian Farms the farthest 

from White Neighborhood . . 101 

IV. — The Encroachments of Immigrants 
and the Violation of Treaties as 
related to Indian Farming . . . 104 

V. — British Columbia and its Indians . Ill 

VI. — Uncertainty of Residence and Indian 

Farming Impossible 125 

VII. — Still Experimenting on Indian Poli- 
cies and Invading Indian Farms . 132 



CONTENTS. 11 
CHAPTER IV. 

DO THE AMERICAN INDIANS INCREASE OR DECREASE? 

Section I. — The Number of Indians in Early New 

England 138 

II. — The Number of Indians East of the 

Mississippi in 1820 141 

III. — Examples of Decrease beyond the 

Mississippi 148 

IV. — Some Personal Investigations . . . 154 

V. — Increase or Decrease in California, 157 

VI. — - The Government Census quite Im- 
perfect, yet Shows much Decrease, 163 

VJJ. — Some Unpleasant Conclusions . . . 166 

VTTT. — English Partnership in the Indian 

Decrease 170 

IX. — Has American Christianity done its 

Best to Preserve the Indian? . 171 

Conclusion- 175 

Index 197 



/ 




THE 

INDIAN'S SIDE OF THE MM QUESTION. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE INDIAN AND HIS WHITE NEIGHBOBS. 

Section 1. — Grood Old Colony Times. 

" Notwithstanding one of the ostensible 
objects of nearly all the royal charters and 
patents issued for British North America 
was the Christianizing of the Indian, few 
could be found equal to the task on arriving 
here. . . . Adventurers were those, generally, 
who emigrated with a view of bettering their 
own condition instead of that of others." 1 

For which those early immigrants are not to 
be reproached, since the most of the human 
family emigrate or stay at home for the 
same reason. Still, we are interested to see 
how it fared in those early times with the 
pagan red men. 

As early as 1670 Richard Bourne was preach- 
ing to the Marshpee Indians on Cape Cod, 
and even then poor white human nature was 

1 Drake's " Indians," bk. ii. 112. 
13 



14 



the Indian's side 



crowding the Indian from those acres of sand 
and scrub. He therefore felt constrained to 
procure from the Court at Plymouth " a rati- 
fication of their deeds, and entailment of their 
lands, bounded by ponds, etc., that were im- 
movable, to these Indians and their children 
forever." The Court ordained "-that no part 
or parcel of their lands could be bought by or 
sold to any white person or persons without 
the consent of all the said Indians, not even 
with the consent of the General Court. " 1 

More than two hundred years of painful 
failures, by government and benevolent organi- 
zations, in following up exiled Indians with 
ploughs and spelling-books and Bibles, have 
confirmed the " discernment " of the Indian 
teacher of Sandwich. It has been found, too, 
that even "ponds" are not immovable as 
bounds to Indian lands. It was about this 
time that Edward Randolph, crown commis- 
sioner on Indian affairs, wrote to William 
Penn : " The Indians were never civilly treated 
by the Government, who made it their busi- 
ness to encroach on the Indian lands, and by 
degrees drive them out." 2 John Randolph 
makes a similar remark a century later : " The 

1 " Plymouth Colony Records "—Mass. His. Soc. Coll., 
vol. iii. p. 188. 

2 Freeman's " Aborigines " from 1620, p. 99. 



OF THE INDIAN" QUESTION". 



15 



least ray of Indian depredation will be an 
excuse to raise troops for those who love to 
have troops, etc." 1 

Nor does all the millennial advance attach to 
the Penn-Indian treaties which ordinary his- 
tory is wont to give. In the deed from the 
Indians to William Penn is this clause of 
metes and bounds : " all along by the west 
side of Delaware river, and so between the 
said creeks, backwards, as far as a man can 
ride in two days with a horse, for and in con- 
sideration of these following goods," etc. No 
doubt, the shekels, current money with the mer- 
chant, were all right, but the borders lack 
somewhat the Abrahamic definiteness of the 
Machpelah lot. That Quaker horse sired a 
long-lived breed, and at times of wonderful 
speed. It seems, too, that the will of William 
Penn was executed in a bloody war. He 
bequeathed ten thousand acres to his grandson 
William, " to be laid out in proper and bene- 
ficial places in this province by his trustees." 
William sold the unlocated grant to one Allen, 
a border-land speculator, who took up the 
amount on territory never conveyed to Penn 
by the Indians. This he cut up into lots for 
settlers, and disposed of them by lottery, as 
Georgia did afterward in exiling the Cherokees, 
1 Letter to Charles Carroll; April, 1791. 



16 



the Indian's side 



in which no recognition was made of Indian 
rights, nor did those who drew the prizes allow 
for them when the fact of the wrong was dis- 
covered. Id this way much of the land in 
the Forks of the Delaware, the present Easton 
and vicinity, was first settled by white men, 
through robbery first, and then gambling. 
" The Indians were thus crowded from it. 
They, for some time, complained, and at 
length began to threaten, but the event was 
war and bloodshed." 1 

The moral grandeur arising from the equity 
and peace with which Penn administered his 
Indian affairs may well keep a place in history. 
Yet it is not evident why it should stand alone, 
as if unequalled. The same thing was done 
throughout New England and New York, only 
that the immense royal grant to Penn enabled 
him to furnish a more extended illustration. 
Twenty years before Penn's noble act, John 
Pynchon paid to the Indians an agreeable 
price for Northampton}, the Hadleys, and vicin- 
ity, in Massachusetts, " not molesting Indians 
nor depriving them of their just rights and 
property without allowance to their satisfac- 
tion." These words are in the first document 
on record in Northampton. % 

It must not surprise if we here anticipate our 
1 Drake, bk. v. 30. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 17 



time in the narrative, to read these passages in 
the report of John Johnson, Indian agent for 
Ohio, 1819, on Penn's Indians — about one hun- 
dred and thirty years after the will of William 
Penn was executed. " The Delawares were 
once very numerous and powerful, but many 
disastrous wars with the white people reduced 
them to a mere handful. . . . They are more 
opposed to the Gospel and the whites than 
any other Indians with whom I am acquainted. 
. . . The United States have engaged to re- 
move them west of the Mississippi. . . . Their 
peculiar aversion to having white people for 
neighbors induced them to remove to the west- 
ward." 

The colonial beginnings with the Indians 
degenerated early, and pious wishes and labors 
were mostly august failures. In 1675 one 
Indian was made a Bachelor of Arts at Cam- 
bridge, yet the same year the General Court 
made this entry on its records : " Hereafter no 
person shall harbor or entertain an Indian." 
No pains were spared to teach them to read and 
write, and in a short time a larger proportion 
of the Massachusetts Indians could do so than 
the inhabitants of Russia in our day. 1 

Eliot taught the men to dig the ground, and 
the women to spin, and the scholarly ones to 
1 Bancroft's " His. U. S.," ii. 94. 



18 



the Indian's side 



raise the old and still vigorous theological 
questions : — 

u When Christ arose, whence came his soul?" 
" Shall I know you in heaven? " " Our little 
children have not sinned ; when they die, 
whither do they go ? " " When such die as 
never heard of Christ, where do they go ? " 
"Why did not God give all men good hearts?" 
" Since God is all-powerful, why did not God 
kill the devil that made men so bad?" 1 

So there came to be the " praying Indians " 
in Eastern and Southern Massachusetts in 1675. 
Prior to this, and in 1654, Roger Williams had 
thus written: "It cannot be hid how all Eng- 
land and other nations ring with the glorious 
conversion of the Indians of New England." 2 

All this seemed most auspicious for the red 
men, yet the bright vision makes only a short 
chapter and covers a narrow territory. Ban- 
croft speaks of them as " crowded by hated 
neighbors, losing fields and hunting-grounds," 
and "broken-spirited from the overwhelming 
force of the English." Near to these, on the 
borders of Rhode Island and in it, were the 
clans of King Philip. " Repeated sales of land 
had narrowed their domains, and the English 
had artfully crowded them into the tongues of 

1 Bancroft's " His. U. S.," ii. 95-6. 

2 " Plymouth Colony Records," x. 439. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 19 

land. . . . There they could be more easily 
watched ; for the frontiers of the narrow penin- 
sulas were inconsiderable. . . . The English 
villagers drew nearer and nearer to them ; 
their hunting-grounds were put under cul- 
ture, and as the ever urgent importunity of 
the English was quieted but for a season by 
partial concessions from the unwary Indians, 
their natural parks were turned into pastures ; 
their best fields for planting corn were gradu- 
ally alienated ; their fisheries were impaired by 
more skilful methods ; and as wave after 
wave succeeded, they found themselves de- 
prived of their broad acres, and, by their own 
legal contracts, driven, as it were, into the 
sea." 1 

Virginia, as well as New England and the 
new States on both sides of the Mississippi, 
showed their repugnance to Indian neighbors : 
" In all these treaties, whether ratified or re- 
jected, the Virginians appear to have been 
determined to coerce a relinquishment of the 
Indian lands, either by fair means or foul, and 
no effort of negotiation or intrigue was omitted 
to accomplish this purpose," etc. 2 Cotton 
Mather speaks of them for those times as " those 
doleful creatures, the veriest ruins of mankind 

1 Bancroft's " His. U. S.," ii. 98-99. 

2 Monette's "His. Miss. VaL," vol. i. p. 349. 



20 



the Indian's side 



to be found on the face of the earth," whose 
" way of living was infinitely barbarous." 1 
The first colonists of the Papal, English, and 
Pilgrim churches opened devoutly with their 
plans for the welfare of the Indians. 

The Bull of Alexander VI., under date of 
Rome, May 4, 1493, conveyed all lands dis- 
covered and to be discovered by the subjects of 
Ferdinand and Isabella to them and to their 
royal successors forever. But they were to 
manage to send to these newly discovered 
countries, whether continent or island, good 
men, fearing God, learned and expert, to in- 
struct the inhabitants of these lands in the 
Catholic faith and in good morals. 2 

When Philip III. of Spain issued his royal 
grant to Don Juan de Onate, in 1602, to colon- 
ize and possess New Mexico, beginning with 
44 200 soldiers, horses, cattle, merchandise, and 
agricultural implements," he ordered that there 
should go with the colony "six priests, with a 
full complement of books, ornaments, and 
church accoutrements." 3 

In 1626-7 Cardinal Richelieu organized his 
company of 44 The One Hundred Associates," 

1 "Life of Eliot." 

2 Deum timentes, doctos, peritos et expertos ad instruen- 
dam incolas et habitat ores prgefatos in Fide Catholica et in 
bonis moribus imbuendam, etc. • 

3 Davis' "El Gringo," p. 73. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



21 



to take possession, for France and the Church, 
of all the territory from Florida to the Arctic 
and from Newfoundland to the sources of the 
St. Lawrence. It was a gigantic scheme of 
colonization to control a wild continent. 

One provision of the charter was this: 44 For 
every new settlement, at least three ecclesiastics 
must be provided." 1 

Early in the last century a Scotch society 
was organized to introduce religious and secu- 
lar teaching among the Indians in New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, and New York. The Rev. John 
Brainard was missionary in the first named 
State, and had residence at Bethel. He was 
to instruct his Indian charge in " spinning 
schools," and teach them how to prepare and 
spin flax. 2 

As is well known, the English Church follows 
the English army and colony the world over. 
As when we assume to do their Home Mission- 
ary work in India we find them there planting 
their creed where they planted their cannon. 

In good old times when Church and State 
were one in Massachusetts, the Great and Gen- 
eral Court enacted thus: " It is agreed that here- 
after noe dwelling-howse shal be builte above 
halfe a myle from the meeting-howse in any 

1 Parkman's "Pioneers of France," p. 397. 

2 "Mag. Am. His.," January, 1885; pp. 95-7. 



22 



the Indian's side 



new plantation without leauve from the 
court. 9 ' 1 

The argument on the union of Church and 
State is not all on one side ; but when, as in the 
United States, we assume the negative, a mo- 
mentous responsibility comes on the church. 
If the Church had provided that meeting-houses 
be supplied comfortably near to the dwell- 
ing-houses " in any new plantacion " on the 
frontier, this ugly Indian question and some 
other border questions could never have so 
troubled us. Somewhat the responsibility of 
those questions lies with the Indian Bureau at 
Washington, that looks after red men ; and 
somewhat, and more largely, it lies with Mis- 
sionary Headquarters, that should look after 
border white men, who have "builte above 
halfe a myle from the meeting-howse." 

Section 2. — Another Side of the Indian Ques- 
tion. 

Our government and private benevolence 
are trying, with most commendable spe- 
cialty, to do a very philanthropic and Chris- 
tian thing for the Indians. Our " wards of 
government " more or less under restraining 
and elevating influences, and exclusive of 
wild Indians and the Alaskans, were reported 
1 " Colonial Records of Mass.," i. 157, 181. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



23 



officially in 1885 to be 259,244. These are 
under about seventy agencies, and are without 
citizenship and without the possibility of owner- 
ship in real estate. Results are not satisfactory 
to white or red man, and there does not yet 
seem reason for varying — except to give place 
to an offered experiment — what Indian Com- 
missioner Walker published in 1874 : " The 
true permanent scheme for the management 
and instruction of the whole body of Indians 
within the control of the government is yet to 
be created." 1 Heretofore we have had the 
policy of the extempore, a system of shifting 
expedients, with annual Reports of failures. 
With temporary and local successes, failure 
as a whole, and decrease in the number 
of the 66 wards," we have lately come to a 
very simple remedy for this evil condition 
of the wasting aborigines. It is citizenship, 
and personal ownership in the land. 

This seems to be the best possible plan for 
the present. It contemplates the absorption of 
Indian nationality in American, and a fusion of 
the two races to the full extent of all civil rela- 
tions — the social and domestic being left to 
their own choices and chances. 

How far is this theory, or scheme, practicable ? 
We call this — the Dawes Bill — the best possi- 
1 " The Indian Question," 1874; p. 99. 



24 



the Indian's side 



ble plan for the present. If, therefore, we 
express any doubts of its success, it will be on 
its feasibility or practicability. Does not any 
scheme which contemplates the civilization and 
preservation of the Indian race require an en- 
ergized social and moral tone in the sections of 
the Union where they are., which national legis- 
lation and Congressional bills cannot generate 
and apply? In his "Sketches of Louisiana," 
Major Stoddard, our first Governor of the Lou- 
isiana Territory, saj's "that any considerable 
intercourse with the whites has invariably 
tended to debase and corrupt them" — the 
Indians. 1 We have yet discovered or acknowl- 
edged only one side or one half of the diffi- 
cultj^ in the Indian question. If we go no 
farther in the study of the case, and in the ad- 
mission of the radical evil, but proceed to a 
remedy, we are in danger of entering on another 
experiment, which will perhaps end in failure 
as all the others have ended. • 

The new scheme contemplates the total 
fusion, civilly, of the white and red races, as 
much as the fusion of any other nationality, 
German, French, or Swede, with the American, 
and of course leaves the social and domestic to 
local and personal option, as is the case with 
the other races. 

1 Page 410. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



25 



Some are discussing the settlement of the 
vexed Indian question by intermarriages and 
so the extinction of race line. At the Mohawk 
Conference of the Board of Indian Commis- 
sioners in 1886, an able paper was read on Indian 
citizenship. The author says : — " That the 
cause of peace and quietness, the progress of 
Christian settlement across the continent, and, 
in short, the welfare of the white races, are in- 
volved in the permanent absorption of all the 
tribes into the American nation, is perhaps a 
generally recognized fact. Some prejudice, it 
is true, appears against the idea of admixture 
or mingling, in the sense of intermarriage and 
entire loss of race identity. But it is impos- 
sible to prevent the mingling of blood on the 
same soil, even if desirable. A large part of 
the population enumerated as Indian is now 
half-breed. . . . We are descended from a com- 
mon father : God has made us 6 of one blood ' ; 
nor have we any right, except that derived 
from power, to withhold from them any privi- 
leges or immunities which we grant to the 
more civilized people. In all this I do not 
recommend the intermingling of the races ; but 
I do not fear it . . . the nightmare of a confu- 
sion of races." 1 ^ 

1 " Eighteenth Annual Report of the Board of Indian Com- 
missioners," 1886; pp. 52-3. 

J 



26 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



The policy here suggested stirs some memories 
and compels some anticipations. The Hudson 
Bay Company are largely responsible for the 
early and prevalent population of the Domin- 
ion, who, until lately, have stood with face 
averted from a lively civilization toward the 
primitive and hybrid forest life. Their em- 
ployes were all from the old country and bach- 
elor men, and thence arose that tawny aristocracy 
of the wilderness, once so characteristic of the 
North Country. Riel and his followers, who 
lately, and twice, with a few years intervening, 
gave the Dominion so much anxiety and labor 
too, were of the same mingled blood, in 
the second, and third, and fourth generations. 
As one goes west and north-west and south- 
west in our own land, he has the same facts 
forced on him. 

It is not alone the copper color and the 
peculiar eye and the dark hair and the 
unmistakable physiognomy in the half-breed 
race which arrest his attention ; but the indo- 
lent motions, the unbusiness-like habits, the 
uninviting home, and the general unthrift 
thrust themselves on him. All these facts, 
abundant on both sides of our national boun- 
dary, confirm and explain a statement given 
me in Wyoming by an American who had been 
a careful observer for forty years of trapper 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



27 



and trader and mining and ranching life in 
our wild and interior west : " Half-breed chil- 
dren are short-lived and lack vigor." 

The agent for the Crow Indians makes a 
similar observation : 44 This agency furnishes 
an example of men of culture becoming worth- 
less by association with the Indians, while 
they have contributed nothing toward the ele- 
vation of the red man. As a rule, the full- 
blooded Indian stands a much better chance to 
become a man than the half-breed. The pres- 
ence of these men causes more trouble in the 
management of the Indians than all other 
causes combined." 1 To make the Dawes Bill 
effective for its end, there may be needed a 
larger corps of what Robert South calls " God's 
police." 

The Report for 1886 of the L'Anse and 
Vieux Desert Reservation gives the number of 
the Indian population as 694. Of that 320 are 
full-bloods and 374 are mixed, more than one 
half. The location of these Indians will be 
noted as in the region of the early trapper and 
fur-trader towns of Detroit and Mackinaw. 
Not only the number of half-breeds here and 
elsewhere must be considered, but the demoral- 
ized condition of society which has produced 
them. 

1 " Report of Commissioners on Indian Affairs," 1874; p. 262. 



28 



the Indian's side 



As to intermarriage as a remedy for the 
evils in question, the plan is not new. It was 
formerly proposed by the Secretary of War. 
when that department had in charge the Ind- 
ian field. 

General William C. Crawford had been a 
member of Congress, ambassador to France, 
and Secretary of War, and aspired to the pres- 
idency, but lost the election as against Mr. 
Monroe. As Secretary of War in 1815, he 
made a sensational Report on the Indian af- 
fairs, with these recommendations : — 

fc * If the s} T stem already devised has not pro- 
duced all the effects which were expected 
from it, new experiments ought to be made. 
Where every effort to introduce among them, 
the Indian savages, ideas of exclusive property 
in things real as well as personal shkll fail, let 
intermarriage between them and the whites be 
encouraged by the government. This cannot 
fail to preserve the race, with the modifications 
necessary to the enjoyment of civil liberty and 
social happiness. It is believed that the prin- 
ciples of humanity, in this instance, are in har- 
monious concert with the true interests of the 
nation. It will redound more to the national 
honor to incorporate by a humane and benevo- 
lent policy the natives of our forests into the 
great American family of freemen, than to 



/ 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 29 

receive with open arms the fugitives of the 
old world, whether their flight has been the 
effect of their crimes or of their virtues." 1 The 
most marked effect of this Report was the polit- 
ical execution of its author. 

Hitherto and nationally the white side of 
the Indian question has been kept back. The 
remark of Secretary Stanton, in 1862, to 
Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota, should head 
this national question, measure the under- 
lying evils, and shape the remedy. 

Admit to their fullest extent the pagan, 
heathen, and savage qualities of many of the 
Indians, we must, nevertheless, give the place 
of prominence to the words of the secretary 
to the bishop : " If you come to Washington 
to tell us that our Indian system is a sink of 
iniquity and a disgrace to the nation, we all 
know it." Color the Indian to the darkest and 
hardest character allowable, by the facts, as a 
human being for civilization and Christianity 
to take in hand, still it must be borne in mind 
that the whites. have been the overwhelming 
party in all Indian transactions, and had every- 
thing their own way. We have dictated and 
broken the most of the treaties, we have neces- 
sitated, initiated, and executed the most of the 
removals, and so far as the Indians have come 
1 Senate Papers, 14th Congress, 1st Session. 



30 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



•I 



under American laws, we have enacted, inter- 
preted, and executed those laws. Generally, 
wherein they have suffered from breach of 
treaty, removal, or from failure of law to 
protect their legal rights, it has been through 
our mal-administration, or negligence, or sin- 
ister design. 

Judge Belford, of Colorado, was credited, not 
long since, with the statement that since our 
independence the United States has made 
929 treaties with 307 Indian tribes and bands. 
Commissioner Walker, discriminating between 
tribes and bands, speaks of "nearly 400 treaties 
confirmed by the Senate, as are treaties with 
foreign powers." 1 As all know, it was at the 
will of the government whether these treaties 
should be observed or broken. The bordering 
whites and designing men back of them had 
their own way. 

It will be observed that the most of this evil 
to the red man, and dishonor to the white man, 
takes place on the frontier, and grows out of 
an incompatibility of neighborhood between 
the two races, on their present level, or grade 
of civilization. The present white civilization 
of the border does not seem to be able to 
tolerate the inferior Indian neighborhood, and 
recognize its natural rights and the claims 

1 44 The Indian Question," by Francis A, Walker, 1874, 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



31 



guaranteed by government. The question has 
often been put beyond the Missouri, whether 
the civilization of the East has, or dees, or 
would, in case of occasion, tolerate Indian 
neighborhood with an elevating sympathy. In 
his " Across the Continent," page 8, Mr. Samuel 
Bowles makes this record : " The almost uni- 
versal testimony of the border men is that 
there can be no terms made with the Indians. 
The only wise policy, they aver, is extermina- 
tion. This is dreadful, if true, but I cannot 
believe it." To speak in round terms, we have 
a curving frontier white belt 1600 miles long, 
and 600 deep, and it is constantly, moving on 
and over Indian lands and reservations and 
rights, inexorable and irresistable. To stop or 
turn it would be like meddling with the stealthy 
shadows of an eclipse. On this belt are 
concentrated the capital of the old East, 
and emigrants from all the old States. In- 
terest in that capital, and sympathy for those 
emigrants, are diffused through the Atlantic 
half of the country. Under the teachings 
and trailing influences of two hundred and 
fifty years the western half of the country 
has not civil and moral sympathy high enough, 
any more than the old East had, to endure 
the Indian as a neighbor, while they settle 
near enough to cultivate covetousness for 



32 



the Indian's side 



his guaranteed lands. " So far have these 
forms of usurpation been carried at times 
in Kansas, that an Indian Reservation there 
might be defined as that portion of the 
soil of the State on which the Indians have 
no rights whatsoever." 1 

" It requires no deep knowledge of human 
nature, and no very extensive knowledge of 
congressional legislation, to assume that many 
and powerful interests will oppose themselves 
to a readjustment of the Indian tribes between 
the Missouri and the Pacific, under the policy 
of seclusion and non-intercourse. Railroad 
enterprises and land enterprises of every 
name will find any scheme that shall be 
seriously proposed to be quite the most ob- 
jectionable of all that could be offered. Every 
State, and every territory that aspires to be- 
come a State, will strive to keep the Indians 
as far as possible from its own borders ; while 
powerful combinations of speculators will 
make their fight for the last acre of Indian 
lands." 2 

This was strong language for a government 
official to use twelve years ago ; and yet the 
facts have more than fulfilled the prediction, 

1 " The Indian Question," by Francis A. Walker; pp. 
77-78; 1874. 

2 Do., pp. 119-120. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



33 



and results are far from honorable to the 
tone of our supposed civilization. And the 
intensity of language has hardly measured 
the greed, the insatiable hunger for Indian 
land. In explaining and defending his Indian 
Severalty Bill, Mr. Dawes has thus expressed 
himself : 66 We are blind, we are deaf, we are 
insane, if we do not take cognizance of the fact 
that there are forces in this land driving on 
this people with a determination to possess 
every acre of their land; and they will lose it, 
unless we work on, and declare that the original 
owner of the land shall, before every acre disap- 
pears from under him forever, have 160 acres 
of it, when he shall be fitted to become a 
citizen of the United States, and prepared 
to bear the burdens as well as share the rights 
of our governnent." 1 

Section 3. — How much can the G-overnment do ? 

The Ordinance of the North-west Territory 
made it the duty of the legislature " to ob- 
serve the utmost good faith towards the In- 
dians ; to protect their property, rights, and 
liberty ; and to pass laws, founded in justice 

1 Speech of Senator Dawes, Board of Indian Commis- 
sioners, Mohawk Lake Conference, Oct. 13, 1886; "Eigh- 
teenth Annual Report," p. 77. 



34 



the Indian's side 



and humanity, for preventing wrongs being 
done to them." In accordance with this Ordi- 
nance, " The bill to prevent the introduction 
of ardent spirits into the Indian towns was 
passed, at the instance of the missionaries of 
the Church of the United Brethren, who had 
made establishments, under authority cf Con- 
gress, at Shoenbrun, Gnadenhiitten, and Salem, 
on the Tuscarawas branch of the Muskingum 
River, then in the County of Washington. 
The Indians in those settlements had been 
Christianized, and had made considerable 
progress in agriculture and the high arts. 
But when the white people settled in their 
neighborhood, and began to associate and 
trade with them, whiskey was introduced into 
their towns, as a profitable article of traffic. 
The effect it was producing on their industry 
and moral habits became alarming, and in- 
duced the missionaries to apply to the General 
Assembly for relief, who granted it promptly, 
to the extent of the means in their power. . . 
For a short time the law produced a good 
effect, but as the white population increased 
and approached nearer to the villages, it was 
found impossible any longer to carry it into 
execution. The result was that the Indians 
became habitually intemperate, idle, and faith- 
less, the missionaries lost all their influence 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



35 



over them, and eventually were constrained 
to abandon the settlements in despair. 1 

In his message to the Territorial Assembly 
of Ohio, in 1800, Governor St. Clair observed 
that " irrespective of the principles of religion 
and justice, it was the interest and should be 
the policy of the United States to be at peace 
with them ; but that could not continue to 
be the case if the treaties existing between 
them and the government were broken with 
impunity by the inhabitants of the Territory. 
He referred to the well known fact that while 
the white men loudly complained of every in- 
jury committed by the Indians, however tri- 
fling, and demanded immediate reparation, they 
were daily perpetrating against them injuries 
and wrongs of the most provoking and atro- 
cious nature, for which the perpetrators had 
not been brought to justice. It was univer- 
sally known that many of those unfortunate 
people had been plundered and abused with 
impunity. Among other things, the governor 
stated that it would be criminal in him to 
conceal the fact that the number of those 
unfortunate people who had been murdered 
since the peace of Greenville, was sufficient 
to produce serious alarm for the consequences. 

1 " Notes on the Early Settlement of the North-west 
Territory." By Jacob Burnet, pp. 211-12, 384. 



36 



the Indian's side 



He added further that a late attempt to 
bring to punishment a white man, who had 
killed two adults of the Six Nations, and 
wounded two of their children, in Trumbull 
County, proved abortive. Though the perpe- 
tration of the homicide was clearly proved, 
and it appeared manifestly to have been com- 
mitted with deliberate malice, the prisoner 
was acquitted." 1 

So far, and in these circumstances, the 
government failed to protect the red man 
against the white man. Government in the 
United States is the voice of the people, and 
the people have decided against the Indian 
when questions of equity were involved. We 
probably never had an army large enough, in 
times of peace, to picket and protect them. 

"From 1821 to 1828 inclusive, the writer 
of these sketches passed through the latter 
settlement (the Wyandots at Upper San- 
dusky) almost every year, and occasionally 
twice a year, which gave him an opportunity 
to know that they were devoting themselves 
principally, and almost exclusively, to agri- 
culture and the arts, and were making rapid 
advances in civilization, when the policy of 
the government compelled them to abandon 

1 Burnet's " Notes on the North- west Territory," pp. 
323-4. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 37 



their farms, dispose of their stock and other 
property at a great sacrifice, and migrate to 
the Far West." 1 

Judge Burnet follows this fact with some 
eminently sensible remarks, and they are as 
pertinent to-day as they were in 1825: "It is 
not just to consider the natives of this country 
as a distinct and inferior race because they 
do not generally imitate us, when we not 
only remove every consideration that could 
induce them to do so, but, in fact, render it 
impossible. What motive of ambition was 
there to stimulate them to effort, when they 
were made to feel that they held their coun- 
try as tenants at will, liable to be driven off 
at the pleasure of their oppressors? As soon 
as they were brought to a situation in which 
necessity prompted them to industry, and in- 
duced them to begin to adopt our manners 
and habits of life, the covetous eye of the 
white man was fixed on their incipient im- 
provements, and they received the chilling 
notice that they must look elsewhere for per- 
manent homes." 2 

Unusual space has been given to these ex- 
tracts from the Notes of Judge Burnet, for 
two reasons. His official duties called him 
to a very wide range of country and of ob- 

1 Burnet's "Notes," pp. 386-7. 2 Burnet, pp. 388-9. 



38 



the Indian's side 



serration. For the North-west Territory, in 
which he held court, embraced the present 
areas of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and 
Wisconsin , and when his circuit took him 
from Marietta to Detroit, he had opportunity 
to see much of Indian life, and of border 
white life. Moreover, in this vast territory 
the government fairly illustrated its principles 
and policies regarding the natives. The qual- 
ity and rank of the writer would warrant us 
also in regarding his observations and opin- 
ions as given with a judicious fairness, ex- 
tending, as they did, over about a third of 
a century. 

In one of his messages to the 23d Congress, 
President Jackson has an idea of the remedy 
for the decrease of the Indians, while the rem- 
edy which he offers is impossible of application. 
He properly apprehends the fact that contact 
with the whites is the destruction of the Indi- 
ans, and proposes complete isolation, which of 
course is impossible. " The experience of every 
year adds to the conviction that emigration [of 
the Indians], and that alone, can preserve from 
destruction the remnant of the tribes yet living 
among us." Now, in the opening of this new 
Indian era, and the most hopeful one we have 
ever had, we are confronted with the problem of 
saving the Indians, not only without emigration, 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



39 



but rather by a more total commingling with 
the whites, in real estate ownership side by 
side, and in mixed industries of a common and 
equal American citizenship. 

Under our present inquiry, How much the 
Government can do for the preservation of the 
Indian race, let reference be had to the fourth 
chapter in this discussion, and to the fourth 
section, under the title, Some Personal Inves- 
tigations. 

It is probably safe to say that the party ad- 
ministration, which should employ, to the con- 
stitutional extent, the civil and military power 
to enforce our Indian treaties, would not survive 
to the succeeding presidential election. It is a 
delusion to think of a power in this nation 
separate from the people, and administering 
what is called a government, which is not the 
will of the people. We have no such thing in 
the United States, and every law unpopular 
with the people is at the mercy of " local op- 
tion " in the court room, if not at the polls. 

The administration of Indian affairs has doubt- 
less been in general accord with the wishes of 
the people of the Great West, and they are more 
than one half the population, and eight ninths 
of the territory, dividing the whole country 
into East and West ; and there is a delusion in 
making three parties — the people, the govern- 



40 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



ment, and the Indians — and blaming the 
government as a third party, for being faithless 
to either or both the other parties. The ground 
difficulty, in the Indian question, has probably 
never been more comprehensively and truthfully 
stated than bj'the aged Cherokee, above quoted, 
the father of Catherine Brown, of missionary 
fame. It was in 1818, and in Georgia. The 
Cherokees were then starting off in farming, and 
government promised them ample supplies, and 
encouragement, and protection. But this bor- 
der civilization crowded them, and government 
offered them protection in Georgia, or a new 
home in the Indian Territory. With a rare 
foresight of the issues, and against advice of 
missionaries, this old and gray-haired Cherokee 
concluded to go over the Mississippi to the 
New Indian Territory, and gave as the reason : 
" Xo Cherokee, or white man with a Chero- 
kee family, can possibly live among such white 
people as will first settle our country." 1 

That agreed perfectly with Stanton's remark 
to Bishop Whipple. And indeed it is but the 
repetition of what John Smith said of the Vir- 
ginia colony : " Much they blamed me for not 
converting the savages, when those they sent 
us were little better, if not worse.*" In speak- 
ing of the destructive influence of frontier and 
1 Tracy's "His. of the Am, Board," p. 75. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



41 



trading men on the Indians, the "Edinburgh 
Review " has this statement : — 

" It has been tried by the French ; it has been 
tried by the English ; and it has been tried by 
the Americans ; and in every case the natives 
have been swept away by war, disease, and 
famine, and the whites have exhibited a fright- 
ful mixture of all the vices of civilized and 
savage life." 1 

The ancient East, where the frontier faded 
out long ago, can but poorly fancy the real bor- 
der of to-day, where this Indian question is so 
intensely and sometimes terribly practical. 
Hence the birth, on the Atlantic slope, of so 
many visionary and sentimental and aesthetic 
theories concerning it. In his admirable His- 
tory of the Mississippi Valley, Monette outlines 
the mixed border society of the two races, with 
a painful fidelity. 64 The confines between the 
white man and the savage present human na- 
ture in its most revolting aspect. The white 
man insensibly, and by necessity, adopts the 
ferocity and the cruelty of his savage competi- 
tor for the forests, and each is alternately 
excited with a spirit of the most vindictive 
revenge." 2 

A case comparatively recent is here in point. 

1 " Ed. Review," vol. lxxxii. no. 165, 1845, p. 243. 

2 Vol. ii. pp. 38, 39. 



42 



the Indian's side 



In 1871-2, the Osages, living in Kansas, ex- 
changed their lands with government for a 
reservation in the Indian Territory. When 
they started for their new home, uncivilized 
whites, some 500 of them, rushed ahead and 
took the reservation, and compelled the Osages 
to camp outside. The War Department ordered 
them off, and political pressure prevented the 
execution of the order till the year following, 
when the troops found 1500 whites in posses- 
sion of the Osage lands, and expelled them. 

The decivilizing influences of frontier life, 
and specially in mining and ranching districts, 
and among those who are emigrant families in 
the third generation from old colony days, are 
beyond the comprehension of the staid, theo- 
retic, and untravelled New Englander. Prai- 
ries, valleys, and mountain ranges, that have 
scant copies of the spelling-book, and that 
seldom or never have echoed the sound of 
church bells, are not apt to be intelligent and 
clear-toned on equity, and treaties, and the 
general rights of person and property and con- 
science, regardless of race or color. A depot 
is no perfect substitute for a school-room, or a 
locomotive bell for a church bell, in carrying 
civilization into a wild country and among men, 
unfortunate for two or three generations, in the 
means of literary, and civil and social eleva- 
tion. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



43 



Of course the government, as well as benev- 
olent societies, has been pressed to make the 
best possible show of their success in Indian 
work. When on a visit to the Indian Territory, 
in 1880, we attended their national fair at 
Muskogee. It was, as one at the North, for a 
show of the products of civilization in farming, 
stock-raising, mechanics, and domestic indus- 
tries. Excepting a very fine show by the ladies 
in the latter, the whole was a surprise and dis- 
appointment. Official reports of civil and be- 
nevolent agents had raised our expectations 
exceedingly beyond the reality. 

A similar delusion was dispelled, with refer- 
ence to the high educational tone among the 
Cherokees. Their schools were fair, but it had 
been impressed on us for years, by reports and 
speeches, that this Indian tribe excelled the 
most, if not all the States, in the rate of tax 
per scholar which it furnished for the common 
school. We found the case to be that, in the 
sale of their Georgia lands by the United States, 
our government wisely conditioned that $30,000 
of the income should be devoted annually to 
schools. They therefore were not voting a 
school tax for this amount, and its excess over 
that in many white States, was no evidence of 
an advanced civilization, or educational ambi- 
tion. 



44 



the Indian's side 



Full admission is made of all we have gained, 
within a few years, in locating Indians on 
reservations, renewing among them their an- 
cient rudimental agriculture, introducing some 
of the elements of education, securing some 
Christian fruit, and imparting some of the 
notions and practices of a crude civilization 
into the Indian family and house. Of course 
our greatest success, as our longest and most 
expensive endeavor, has been among the Chero- 
kees. But here, as will be shown in pages 
following, we found them unwilling to add 
tilth, and buildings, and fences, and wells, and 
highways to land which they did not individu- 
ally own, and which they expected to leave 
under constraint and pressure. They had the 
traditions, and some of the older ones had the 
memories, of their fatherland, east of the great 
river. 

Section. 4. — The Army and the Indian. 

" Some Mormons who were crossing the 
plains to Utah had a lame ox, which they 
turned loose to die, and a camp of Indians 
found and killed it, and made a feast. The 
Mormons saw this in the distance, and, think- 
ing t\\Qj could secure payment, stopped at 
Fort Laramie, and told the officer in command 
the Indians had stolen their ox. The officer, 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



45 



who was half drunk, took some soldiers, went 
to the Indian villiage, and demanded the ox. 
The Indians said : ' We thought the white man 
had turned him loose to die. We have eaten 
the ox ; if the white man want pay for him, 
you shall have it out of our next annuity.' 
4 No,' said the drunken officer, 6 1 want the 
ox, and, if you do not return him, I will 
fire upon you.' He did fire on them, and 
killed a chief. The Indians rallied, and 
exterminated the command. That war cost 
one million dollars." 1 For a generation the 
Sioux, who were thus outraged, had been the 
devoted friends of our government. How 
much better the kind and wise counsel of 
Jefferson: " The most economical as well as 
most humane conduct towards them is to bribe 
them into peace, and retain them in peace by 
eternal bribes." 2 

An army among the uncivilized is not a 
civilizing but a conquering, humiliating force ; 
and ordinarily it does not generate the soften- 
ing, genial, and elevating qualities, which we 
group under the term civilization. While it 
has its uses, as organized physical force, to 
hold savagery in check, and to throw pro- 

1 " Guide to the Northern Pacific Railroad," by Henry I. 
Winser, 1883, p. 92. 

2 Letter to Charles Carroll, April, 1791. 



46 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



tection over rights which have migrated be- 
yond the borders of civil jurisdiction, it is 
not aggressive in the introduction of the 
civil and social and industrial and moral 
qualities which constitute the foundations of 
society. While our frontier army has found 
the Indians simply gregarious, it has succeeded 
mainly, in gathering them in corrals to be 
fed. 

Nor are the United States alone in this 
policy of so using a national army among in- 
ferior and barbarous peoples. It is poor credit 
to the civilized nations that they do not 
elevate the people whom they subdue, and 
preserve their separateness and automony. 
Subjection is followed by denationalization, 
and absorption ends in extinction. Of the de- 
pendencies which Great Britain has had, — 
forty and more even yet, — development into 
separateness has been allowed only in the case 
of the thirteen American colonies, and then 
from inability to do otherwise. And neither 
France nor Spain, nor, indeed, any European 
government, has ever become the willing 
mother of a nation. Their complex prob- 
lem in Asia and Africa is, apparently, how 
not to do it. 

Nor must this be taken as reproach to the 
military. The army is organized, educated, 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 47 



and applied physical force, and is not to be 
reproached for not accomplishing what it is 
neither adapted nor designed to produce. 
Like produces like. General Custer's reflec- 
tions, therefore, are apt and sensible from the 
base line of an army, and from the tone and 
scope of the education of a gallant soldier, 
as he was : — 

" My firm conviction, based upon an inti- 
mate and thorough analysis of the habits of 
character, and native instinct of the Indian, 
and strengthened and supported by the almost 
unanimous opinion of all persons who have 
made the Indian problem a study, and have 
studied it, not from a distance, but in immedi- 
ate contact with all the facts bearing there- 
upon, is, that the Indian cannot be elevated 
to that great level where he can be induced to 
adopt any policy or mode of life, varying from 
those to which he has ever been accustomed, 
by any method of teaching, argument, reason- 
ing, or coaxing, which is not preceded and 
followed closely in reserve by a superior physi- 
cal force. In other words the Indian is capable 
of recognizing no controlling influence but that 
of stern arbitrary power." 1 

On this theory the army must be ruled 
out as a constructing and elevating power 
1 " Life on the Plains." 



j 



48 



the Indian's side 



to bring the Indian up to a fair citizenship 
and manhood. " Stern arbitrary power " can- 
not accomplish that. One of the difficulties, and 
a strong one, in the way of securing the ends of 
the Dawes bill, is that this sentiment, naturally 
common to the frontier where the civil and moral 
code have not become prominent and patronized 
by the armj r , as in their line of work, holds sway, 
and puts the Indian beyond the range of the 
ordinary civilizing forces. The army has its 
place and work on the border, but the tactics 
of West Point are not adequate to the emer- 
gencies of the Indian Problem. 

Section 5. — The Courts as Protectors of the 
Indian Rights. 

Much reliance is placed on the United States 
laws and courts to secure justice to the wards 
of the government. A careful, hesitating con- 
fidence here will be the wiser course. Law is 
not a leader of public sentiment or a reformer, 
but only the legislative utterance of public 
opinion, and of a reform gained. Lav/ is the 
will of the people in print. It is the ratchet 
on the wheel, and will hold only, and not turn, 
or pull, or lift. If the States and Territories, 
where the Indians are, do not wish them to 
remain there, Congress is impotent, and the 
courts are powerless. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



49 



In some cases in the East, where prejudice 
or passion runs strong, the trial is moved to 
some distant section, where the jury and court 
may be presumed to be less biassed, or, as is 
said, the venue is changed. In a case for Indian 
justice, arising as far west as Colorado or Wy- 
oming, the venue would need to be changed to 
a county east of the Mississippi, if not of the 
Alleghanies. 

In the Indian Territory, legislation and the 
courts have illustrated the protection of the 
Indian by law. Cases arising between Indians 
they handle themselves ; cases between In- 
dians and whites go to a United States court 
in Arkansas. The Indian Commissioner, for 
1874, however, says : " Lawlessness and vio- 
lence still continue in the Indian Territory. . . . 
All efforts on the part of the Indians to es- 
tablish a government have failed. Such ad- 
ministration of the law in this country, as is 
possible through the United States District 
Courts of Arkansas, scarcely deserves the 
name. Practically, therefore, we have a coun- 
try embracing 62,253 square miles, inhabited 
by more than 75,000 souls, including 50,000 
civilized Indians, without the protection of 
law, and not infrequently the scene of vio- 
lence and wrong." 1 

1 " Report," 1874, pp. 11, 12. 



50 



the Indian's side 



In 1880, this case was detailed there, to the 
writer, as of recent date. A white man so 
cnt an Indian in a quarrel that he was bleed- 
ing to death. A surgeon was called, who said 
he could save his life, but declined to do ser- 
vice, or see the patient, and so let the Indian 
die. His reasons for refusal were that the 
case would annoy him by a long, distant, and 
expensive absence at Fort Smith, in Arkansas, 
as a witness against a white man ; and on his 
return his life would be in great peril, for 
testifying for an Indian against a white man. 
In the Report of the Commissioner, for 1880, 
Mr. Walker strongly urges additional legisla- 
tion for the Indian Territory, to protect the 
property, and virtue, and person of the In- 
dians. If, in that compact body of 75,000, so 
immediately under the United States, the ad- 
ministration of law " scarcely deserves the 
name," how must it now be in the small and 
isolated reservations, hemmed in by semi-civ- 
ilized and hostile white borders? Will citi- 
zenship and land in severalty carry there any- 
thing more than the shadow of titles, when 
the new theory is put in practice ? Will there 
not be needed, indispensable to success, an 
element of power underneath, outside and co- 
working, which cannot emanate from Wash- 
ington ? 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



51 



An Indian can have but a poor show in 
court in the region where such facts are man- 
ufactured as constitute the body of this vol- 
ume. It would not be a case of law and 
evidence, but of sentiment. 

Commissioner Walker makes a statement, 
pertinent here, and deduced from wide obser- 
vation : " The principle of secluding Indians 
from whites, for the good of both races, is 
established by an overwhelming preponder- 
ance of authority." 1 

But the time is passed for Indian residence 
beyond the reach of white men. From colo- 
nial times, the Americans were always seeking 
for lands and fortunes beyond the last village, 
and highway, and lone cabin. Nearer to the 
horizon has been the passion and watchword, till 
trails have gone everywhere across the prairies, 
and the blazed trees have marked the bridle- 
paths through all forests and over all mountains. 
The Indians cannot be secluded from the 
65,000,000 of whites in this country. 

Section 6. — Encouragement lies in Broader 
Work. 

It is expecting very much to see the strong 
current, so long adverse, turn favorably and 
popularly for the poor Indian. Yet the pros- 
1 " Indian Question, " p. 63. 



52 



the Indian's side 



pect is favorable. The revival of the Indian 
question is quite general, the study of it 
broader than ever before, and the discovery 
and admission of our national mistakes have 
I been well made. In order now to the best 
chance for success, it remains to see and con- 
fess that much of the failure lies in the im- 
perfect white civilization, bordering on the 
Indians. We cannot reach the Indians with- 
out those whites, and we cannot civilize them 
with such whites. The humiliating declara- 
tion of the old Cherokee must be kept in 
sight : " No Indian can possibly live among 
such white people as will first settle our 
country." 

A more thorough policy and process of white 
civilization on the border must precede a more 
successful Indian civilization. For evidently 
a higher Christian tone in border life is indis- 
pensable to turn the tide and stay this mortify- 
ing failure. In our marvellous interior growth, 
educating and Christian influences have not 
been made to keep abreast of our immigration 
and agricultural and mining and railroad 
development. For nearly forty years we have 
had mining regions, and for twenty years they 
have been many times the area of New Eng- 
land, with their beginnings of cities and States, 
into which educating and Christianizing forces 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 53 



have moved much later, and are still moving in 
tardily. All these were, white centres in the 
Indian country. The early neglect of these, 
because they did not furnish pleasant openings 
and calls to benevolent and civilizing work, 
has had much to do in loading down the 
Indian question with difficulties and dishonors. 
It is no comfortable thing to be said or seen or 
inferred, that American Christianity does not 
keep pace with American capital and immigra- 
tion and industrial energies, as the nation 
moves west. 

This whole inquiry shows a failure to pre- 
serve and locate permanently and civilize the 
Indians, through a lack of moral element on the 
white border. The government has not been 
able to keep its faith and honor in dealing with 
them, since the people, whose voice the gov- 
ernment is, have not toned up the govern- 
ment, and strengthened it morally to bear 
the hand of equity to the red man. Our new 
and semi-Indian country, always in the major- 
ity, has shaped the Indian policy, while we 
have failed to mould that country for the high- 
est civil and religious ends. For one of two 
inferences is irresistible, — either American 
Christianity is not adequate to civilize the 
Indians, or we have not properly applied it. 
Apparently the failure has been to civilize and 



54 



the Indian's side 



Christianize the white border to such an extent 
as to secure its moral respect and toleration for 
an Indian reservation, which the faith of the 
government has guaranteed. 

Now, at this late day of disaster, to give 
citizenship and land in severalty to the Indian, 
without touching the cause of so much degra- 
dation at white hands, will be still to delude 
and degrade with shadows of better name and 
a gilding. Probabl} r the best thing to be done 
for the Indian is to give him a qualified citizen- 
ship, and land in fee-simple under stringent and 
guarding conditions. Yet these gifts will 
prove a peril and a mockery if not accompanied 
by the elevating influences which white neigh- 
bors have failed to furnish. While the Amer- 
ican church is able to reconstruct the religions 
of the old world, and make civilized nations out 
of pagan ones, it will expose her administra- 
tion of Christianity to grave criticism by later 
historians if she has not been willing to save 
the native races of her own country from ex- 
tinction. 

With a steady failure, for 250 years, to per- 
petuate the Indian tribes, and to civilize, edu- 
cate, and Christianize them ; with but a humil- 
iating success in engrafting on the Indian 
stock the industries of the whites; with a 
progressive and almost total extinction of 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



55 



Indian titles, and absorption of Indian lands 
westward to the Mississippi ; with this fron- 
tier tone toward the Indian, and with this kind 
of white civilization that borders the Indian 
belt and reservations — will citizenship and 
lands in severalty prove sufficient remedies ? 

It is sometimes one half of the victory about 
to be won to-day, to have discovered where 
we failed yesterday; and sometimes it is like 
doubling our forces to ascertain the weakest 
place in the lines of the enemy. We start off 
with much of hope and confidence in this new 
movement for Indian civilization after having 
gained the secret of our failures hitherto. The 
environment, the ab extra conditions of this race, 
have foreordained the neutralization and failure 
of our endeavors. For we will not admit that 
our common Christianity and our American 
civilization properly applied cannot make a fair 
Christian and a fair citizen out of an American 
Indian. 



56 



the Indian's side 



CHAPTER II. 

THE CHEROKEE EXPERIMENT. THE RESERVA- 
TION SYSTEM A FAILURE. 

One case is worth two theories on the Indian 
question, and if a century of trials has not 
made it evident what we can do with the 
aborigines, it has shown conclusively that cer- 
tain things cannot be done. Probably a better 
case could not be selected to illustrate our 
successes and failures with the Indian than the 
Cherokee, since the government and our benev- 
olent societies have had this tribe on hand 
longer than any other, and with more liberal 
expense, and through and around them have 
tested so many legal questions and civil and 
social problems of Indian and white neighbor- 
hood. A few facts will present the Cherokee 
experiment. 

Section 1. — Indian Farmers among White 
Farmers. 

The original and first claim on the soil in 
North America is an Indian right to occupation 
and use. In the sixteen treaties of the United 
States with the Cherokees, this claim was con- 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



57 



ceded to them and respected by our govern- 
ment. The first five Presidents rested treaties 
with the Indians on this claim. In the fifteenth 
with the Cherokees, 1817, which stipulated for 
their going over the Mississippi, this was the 
eighth article : " To every head of an Indian 
family, residing on the lands ceded by the 
Cherokees in this treaty, shall be allowed a 
section of land, that is, 640 acres, provided he 
wishes to remain on the land thus ceded, and 
to become a citizen of the United States. He 
shall hold a life estate, with a right of dower 
to his widow, and shall leave the land in fee- 
simple ta.his children." 

The State of Georgia claimed from Colonial 
rights the lands west of her present limits to 
the Mississippi, that is, the present territory of 
Alabama and Mississippi. Large tracts in this 
western claim she sold, then repealed the law 
under which the sale was made, and declared 
the titles of sale void. The case went to the 
Supreme Court, which ruled that the State 
must indemnify the purchasers. The " Yazoo 
fraud," so called, is a long story. Suffice it to 
say, Georgia ceded to the United States all her 
right, title, and claim to what is now the terri- 
tory of those two States, and the United States 
promised, in return, $1,250,000, from the first 
net proceeds from the sale of these lands. 



58 



the Indian's side 



This was not in payment for the land, or for 
any claim on it, but " as a consideration for 
the expenses incurred by the said State, in re- 
lation to the said territory." It was also stipu- 
lated that " The United States shall, at their 
own expense, extinguish, for the use of Georgia, 
as early as the same can be peaceably obtained, 
on reasonable terms, . . . the Indian title to 
all lands within the State of Georgia." Such, 
for substance to our purpose, was " the compact 
of 1802," so called. 

It would seem that the Cherokees had pos- 
sessed, in Colonial days, " more than half of the 
State of Tennessee, the southern part of Ken- 
tucky, the southwest corner of Virginia, a con- 
siderable portion of both the Carolinas, a small 
portion of Georgia, and the northern part of 
Alabama." Here were about 35,000,000 acres, 
more than seven times the area of Massachu- 
setts. Between 1783 and 1820 they quit- 
claimed more than three fourths of this to the 
United States, and then declined to sell more. 
Of the balance, 5,000,000 acres were claimed 
by Georgia, as within her State limits, and in 
that claim and its outcome the " Cherokee 
Question " took on its troublesome features, 
mortifying and humiliating to the United States, 
disheartening and decivilizing to the Cherokees, 
and ominously, painfully prophetic to all our 
Indian tribes. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 59 



By the compact of 1802 the United States 
had promised to extinguish the Indian title in 
Georgia at as early a date as it could be done 
peaceably, yet if the natives preferred to remain 
there was nothing in any treaty or precedent of 
the government that could force their removal. 
They could remain from generation to genera- 
tion. Moreover, in the treaty of Holston, 
eleven years before, was this article : " That the 
Cherokee nation may be led to a greater degree 
of civilization, and to become herdsmen and 
cultivators, instead of remaining in a state of 
hunters, the United States will, from time to 
time, furnish, gratuitously, the said nation 
with useful implements of husbandry; and fur- 
ther to assist the said nation in so desirable a 
pursuit," etc. 

It is quite evident that the government was 
sincere, and more or less active, in its earlier 
days, to civilize the Indians and retain them 
permanently on their old and reserved hunting- 
grounds. The Delaware treaty, in 1778, even 
contemplated an Indian State, with its repre- 
sentative in Congress, and the twelfth article 
of the Hopewell treaty, 1785, says : " They 
shall have a right to send a deputy of their 
own, whenever they think fit, to Congress." 
The Delawares are now in the Indian Terri- 
tory ; they numbered 71 souls in 1885, and are 



60 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



combined with eight or ten tribes under one 
agency. Therefore, the Cherokees were en- 
couraged and aided by the government and by 
benevolent societies to develop agriculture, 
plant towns, establish a system of laws, found 
schools and churches ; in brief, do just what is 
being done to-day for the Indians. With a 
full faith in the wishes and promises of the 
government, the Cherokees made quite as much 
advance in these lines as could be expected. 

They began to dispose of their lands in order 
to lessen the range of hunting-ground, and take 
on agricultural limits as well as pursuits. They 
welcomed secular and religious teachers, and 
agriculture, education, and religion carried 
them upward, so that in 1808 a teacher, ap- 
pointed by the General Assembly of the 
Presbyterian Church, reported : " The period 
has at last arrived on which I have long 
fixed my eager eye. The Cherokee nation 
has, at length, determined to become men 
and citizens. A few days ago, in full council, 
they adopted a constitution, which embraces a 
simple principle of government. The legisla- 
tive and judicial powers are vested in a general 
council, and lesser ones subordinate. All crim- 
inal accusations must be established by testi- 
mony." 1 

i "His. of Am. Board," p. 68, 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



61 



Section 2. — Mixed Society : The civilizing 
Indian : the wild Indian : the hostile White 
Man. 

It was quite natural that a portion of the 
tribe should prefer to continue the free, lazy, 
and wild hunter-life of their ancestry and 
childhood. A delegation to Washington drew 
a dividing line. The Upper Towns asked 
for a permanent allotment of their propor- 
tion of the lands, that they might settle 
down in perpetuity in their old homes and 
new farms in Georgia, and follow a civilized 
life. The Lower Towns asked for an exchange 
of their proportion of land for new homes 
beyond the Mississippi, where they could in- 
dulge, without molestation, their hereditary 
passion for the wigwam and the chase. 

It was easy for the government to send ex- 
plorers, as it did, to select wild lands for the 
Lower Towns in the remote West, but the 
welcome evidence of a growing civilization, 
and a disinclination of two thirds of the tribe 
to leave Georgia, annoyed the citizens and 
perplexed the general government, as it was 
obligated to remove them as early as it could 
be done amicably. The theory of the govern- 
ment was to civilize and establish them where 
they were, while the Holston treaty and Geor- 



62 



the Indian's side 



gia contemplated their ultimate removal. The 
perplexity of the government was the greater, 
since the civilizing agencies and influences 
that were lifting the Cherokees toward in- 
telligent and thrifty citizenship were from 
abroad. The State of Georgia and the white 
neighborhood of these natives were not aiding 
and abetting in this work. While the Indian 
farms and growing villages were in the wilds of 
her interior or borders, that State was indiffer- 
ent to what foreign benevolence was doing 
within her boundaries. So the colony of 
Oglethorpe began to fall into line, with all 
the older ones, in the consent that Indian 
farming is a good theory, and an Indian farm 
a good thing — afar off. The nearer they came 
to being " persons of industry and capable of 
managing their property with discretion," — as 
many were recognized and named in the Calhoun 
treaty of 1819, when one square mile was se- 
cured in fee-simple to each of those, — the more 
unwelcome they were to the whites. 

In this divided public sentiment and sym- 
pathy on the Indian question, the general 
government adopted a divided policy, which 
is quite natural where the people rule. They 
provided for those who would go, and for 
those who would stay, and progress was made 
only as fast as white settlements and specula- 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



63 



tive land interests advanced on the reserva- 
tions. " The Cherokees did not show them- 
selves unwilling to sell their lands so long as 
an adequate motive was presented to their 
minds. During every administration of our 
national government, applications were made 
to them for the purpose of obtaining additional 
portions of their territory. These applications 
were urged, not only nor principally by the 
consideration of the money or presents which 
they were to receive in exchange, but often 
and strongly by the consideration that they 
would become an agricultural people, like the 
whites ; that it was for their interest to have 
their limits circumscribed, so that their young 
men could not have a great extent of country to 
hunt in ; and that, when they became attached 
to the soil, and engaged in its cultivation, the 
United States would not ask them to sell any 
more land. Yielding to these arguments, and 
to the importunities of the whites, the Chero- 
kees sold, at different times, between the close 
of the Revolutionary War and the year 1820, 
more than three quarters of their original inher- 
itance." 1 

Indian matters lingered and progressed, and 

1 " William Penn on the Indian Crisis," 1829, p. 8, — an 
admirable pamphlet of twenty-four letters from "The 
National Intelligencer." 



64 



the Indian's side 



white settlements in Georgia advanced, and 
land speculators and Indian men showed in- 
creased activity. 

On the 8th of July, 1817, a most important 
treaty was arranged with the' Cherokees, well 
illustrating those white pressures on Indian 
reservations that have gone grinding over them 
like Arctic ice-floes over capes and islands 
and Eskimo huts. It ceded large tracts of 
land to the United States, provided for a census 
of the Cherokees wdio preferred to go over the 
Mississippi, divided the annuities in ratio be- 
tween those remaining and those going, granted 
land, acre for acre, beyond the Misssissippi to 
those who might leave, paid for improvements 
on lands left by the emigrants, and ceded, se- 
cured, in fee-simple, 640 acres to every head of 
an Indian family who preferred to remain where 
he then resided within any large ceded tract, 
and to become a citizen of the United States, 
reaffirmed all previous treaties with the Chero- 
kees, and provided flat-boat transportation and 
provisions to the emigrating party. This treaty 
is signed by Andrew Jackson and other com- 
missioners, and by thirty-one chiefs and war- 
riors of the party who were to remain, and by 
fifteen of those of the party who were to emi- 
grate. 

As to the quality and condition of those 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 65 



who then went over the Mississippi and set- 
tled in the recently organized Indian Terri- 
tory, one statement will illustrate. Speaking 
of the Cherokees along the Arkansas and 
below Mulberry River, Major Long says : 
" These settlements, in respect to the com- 
forts and conveniences of life they afford, ap- 
pear to vie with, and in many instances even 
surpass those of the Americans in that part of 
the country." 1 

In 1819 one more treaty was made with the 
Cherokees. Its preamble states the fact that 
" the greater part of the Cherokee nation have 
expressed an earnest desire to remain on this 
side of the Mississippi," and wish "to com- 
mence those measures which they deem neces- 
sary to the civilization and preservation of 
their nation." The treaty is mostly a provis- 
ion of ways and means for carrying out the 
preceding one, and also sets apart 100,000 
acres of the ceded territory for school pur- 
poses on the unceded, assigns one third of the 
annuities to the emigrating body, and forbids 
whites to enter on the ceded lands prior to 
January 1, 1820. 

1 Long's "Expedition from Pittsburg to the Kocky 
Mountains," 1819-20 ; vol. ii. p. 347. 



66 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



Section 3. — Indian Civilization Adjourned. 

Meanwhile the emigrating ones took up their 
sad journey toward the setting sun, after the 
usage of all red men since white men settled 
on the Atlantic coast. Of course it may be 
said, in technical and strictly legal phrase, that 
they went freely, yet the emigration was origi- 
nated and consummated by the most over- 
bearing forces known to civil and social life. 
Extracts from missionary records will suggest 
the painful and humiliating facts. 

"Nov. 4, 1818. The parents of Catherine 
Brown called on us. The old gray-headed 
man, with tears in his eyes, said he must go 
over the Mississippi. The white people would 
not suffer him to live here. They had stolen 
his cattle, horses, and hogs, until he had very 
little left. He expected to return from the 
agency in about ten days, and should then 
want Catherine to go home and prepare to 
go with him to the Arkansas. . . . These 
people consider the offer of taking reserves, 
and becoming citizens of the United States, 
as of no service to them. They know they are 
not to be admitted to the rights of freemen, 
or the privilege of their oath, and say no Cher- 
okee, or white man with a Cherokee family, 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 67 



can possibly live among such white people as 
will first settle this country. 

"Nov. 28. The great talk, for which the 
people began to assemble on the 20th of Octo- 
ber, was closed yesterday. The United States 
commissioners proposed to the Cherokees an 
entire change of country, except such as chose 
to take reserves, and come under the govern- 
ment of the United States. This proposition 
they unanimously rejected, and continued to 
reject, as often as repeated, urging that the 
late treaty might be closed as soon as possible. 
Nothing was done." 1 

One other treaty, and only one, was formed 
with the Cherokees of Georgia. We have 
already outlined it, — the one of 1819. After 
this the citizens of Georgia, and politicians and 
speculators outside, at Washington and else- 
where, struggled, by various expedients, to 
reopen negotiations for the extinguishing of 
more Indian title and the removal of more 
Indians, but in vain. They pressed Congress 
for appropriations to aid in reopening — a 
white man's bargain with red men is very 
expensive ; the entire administration of Mr. 
Monroe was teased for this purpose ; but 
chiefs and warriors, at home and at Washing- 
ton, refused energetically. They declared in 
1 " His. of Am. Board," p. 75. 



68 



the Indian's side 



writing that the treasury of the United States 
had not money enough to buy another foot of 
Cherokee land. Georgia, impatient of the gov- 
ernment delay and failure, and trying for several 
years to reopen treaty negotiations with the 
Indians for the rest of their lands within the 
State, and obtaining only the stern refusal to 
sell more, first upbraids the government for not 
making another treaty and procuring the rest 
of the Indian lands, and then takes the ground 
that the Indian tribes are in no such sense a 
nation as that a treaty can be formed with them, 
and that no treaty proper has been formed 
with them by the general government, or is 
necessary in order to remove them and take 
possession of their lands ; that prior to the 
compact of 1802 Georgia, by her own right as 
a sovereign State, could have taken those lands 
either by negotiation or force, as she might 
elect, but consented to have the general gov- 
ernment do it at government expense. This 
was in 1827. 

Section 4. — Indian Civilization Fatally Struck. 

In the following year this law was passed 
by the Legislature of Georgia, and approved : 
" That all laws, usages, and customs, made, 
established, and in force in the said territory, 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 69 



by the said Cherokee Indians, be, and the same 
are hereby, on and after the first clay of June, 
1830, declared null and void ; 

"That no Indian, or descendant of an Ind- 
ian, residing within the Creek or Cherokee 
nations of Indians, shall be deemed a compe- 
tent witness, or a party to any suit, in any 
court created by the Constitution or laws of this 
State, to which a white man may be a party." 

This law did two things. It disbanded and 
dissolved the Cherokee nation as a civil 
organization. Its elections, legislature, courts, 
and all other civil proceeding of government 
were made null and void. It put the Chero- 
kee tribe under another government as totally 
as if they had been kidnapped ; and it so out- 
lawed them as to deny them a standing in the 
courts of Georgia, except as criminals. From 
time immemorial, under both king and presi- 
dent, they had been subject to no jurisdiction 
but their own. This iron foot of Georgia 
crushed barbarously through all their machin- 
ery of government, and annihilated their prop- 
erty, by first destroying the laws under which 
they had acquired it, and then thrust- 
ing them under a government that ignored 
them and alienated it. The avowed purpose 
was to expel them from lands that were their 
own before Columbus saw America. 



70 



the Indian's side 



The issue is now complete, and the three 
parties have made it triangular. The general 
government has promised to extinguish the 
title to all Indian lands in Georgia, and for the 
use of that State, "as early as the same can 
be peaceably obtained, on reasonable terms.*' 
The title to about three fourths had been so 
extinguished, and about 6,000,000 of acres re- 
mained in Indian title. This was secured to 
the Cherokees, till they should be willing to 
quitclaim it, under an older treaty, in which 
the government say they "will continue the 
guarantee of the remainder of their country 
forever." The Cherokees, as the second party, 
after a month's discussion, and in much 
warmth, have vigorously determined to sell 
no more land. Then Georgia, seeing the 
failure of the government, and the refusal of 
the Indians, and after trying seven years to 
overcome the inability of the one and the un- 
willingness of the other, formally declares, in 
her Legislature, that "it is unquestionably 
true, that, under such circumstance, force be- 
comes right." Then, in her own sovereignty, 
she declares the Indian title null and void, 
breaks up their government, tramples on their 
young civilization, treats them as tenants at 
will, and orders them out of the country. 

As we have now to do with facts and not 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



71 



feelings, we glide along to results. This was 
a good time for our nation to make a move 
upward to that highest grade of national honor, 
which develops in a sacred regard for treaty 
obligations, into the assuming of which Hamil- 
ton^ in the seventy-fifth number of the " Fed- 
eralist " says there enters " a nice and uniform 
sensibility to national honor." From first to 
last the United States had said to all her 
Indian wards what she said in the treaty of 
Holston, 1791 : " The United States solemnly 
guarantee to the Cherokee nation all their 
lands, not hereby ceded." The government 
was solemnly pledged to stand between them 
and fraud and violence. If treaty and policy 
and promise and growth may not be sustained 
here, can the government make a stand any- 
where for the Indians within or beyond the 
Rocky Mountains? 

If the antipathies of race and color and 
semi-civilization and greed of land may break 
through here, can American civilization and 
the American administration of Christianity 
set an irresistible barrier anywhere else between 
the Mississippi and the Pacific ? If the Indian 
must here see all equity and treaty and pledge 
and promising civilization blotted out, can he 
ever, in the future, trust in the government, or 
hope for a permanent home, or labor heartily to 



72 



the Indian's side 



obtain a white man's civilization ? All these 
questions stood around the Speaker's table in 
the Georgia Legislature on that ominous De- 
cember 20, 1828. 

Section 5. — Border White Men Superior to 
the United States. 

But national honor, treaties, government, 
and benevolent plans for elevating the abor- 
igines, the reservation theory, a germinant and 
promising civilization, the flattering and invigo- 
rating anticipations of the red man, — all were 
swept away by that December vote, and the 
winter of their discontent set in on the 
Indians. 

They appealed to the Secretary of War that 
they be protected in the possession of their 
land and government, according to national 
guarantee, now forty years old, and reaffirmed 
in six separate treaties. The reply is made 
through the Secretary, and under direction of 
the President, "that no remedy can be per- 
ceived, except that which frequently heretofore 
has been submitted to your consideration, — a 
removal beyond the Mississippi, where alone 
can be assured to you protection and peace." 
. . . They must "yield to the operation of 
those laws which Georgia claims and has a 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 73 



right to extend throughout her own limits, or 
to remove beyond the Mississippi, . . . carry- 
ing along with you that protection which, 
there situated, it will be in the power of the 
government to extend." 1 

In order to dispossess and remove the Ind- 
ians, the plan was matured by Georgia to seize 
all their lands, divide them into parcels of 140 
acres each, and dispose of them by lottery. 
The scheme appealed well to the speculator 
and demagogue and border white man. Natu- 
rally the missionaries would be in the way in 
executing this programme, and a law was 
passed for the purpose of expelling them, and 
under it they were cast into the penitentiary, 
and the missions broken up. With great in- 
dignities and severity and cruelty, these men of 
God were chained to each other by the ankle 
in pairs, or, with chain and padlock on the 
neck, were made fast to a horse or cart, and so 
compelled, on foot, to traverse rough and wild 
ways, some of them even fifty miles. They ap- 
pealed to the President for relief, but he de- 
clined to interfere, on the ground that Georgia 
was sovereign for all such matters within her 
own boundaries. The case went to the Su- 
preme Court, when Chief Justice Marshall 
declared the act of Georgia, in extending her 

1 " Records of the Department of War," April 18, 1829. 



74 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



jurisdiction over the Cherokee lands, repugnant 
to the Constitution, treaties, and laws of the 
United States, and therefore null and void, and 
ordered the discharge of the missionaries. The 
Georgia court refused the mandate, and so set 
the United States Supreme Court at defiance. 
Afterward the Legislature repealed the uncon- 
stitutional law. After much aggravating delay, 
and the cultivation of " nullification," the mis- 
sionaries were discharged, yet with great lack 
of dignity and manliness on the part of the 
authorities. This was in 1833. A short time 
before, Webster had made his remarkable 
speech against nullification, but Georgia was 
still affected somewhat with that political 
heresy. 

Section 6. — The Sad Journey of Sixteen 
Thousand into Exile. 

Prior to this, and meanwhile, the work went 
on of despoiling the poor Cherokees. The 
lottery was drawn in the autumn of 1832, 
amid the revels of whiskey and debauchery, 
in which many good Cherokees stumbled, 
being abandoned of the general government 
and disheartened. The removal was mainly 
in 1838, and the number about 16,000. They 
persistently refused to go unless forced, yet 
said they would not resist. Some thousands 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 75 

of United States troops went into their coun- 
try, under General Scott, and began the work 
by making prisoners of single families, and 
thus gathering them into groups. Fourteen 
camp divisions were made, and finally the sad 
march began. Ten months from the time 
they began to be gathered, this sad exodus 
commenced. The distance was about 700 
miles, and the time was four to five months. 
Credit is given for good management and 
kindness in the sorrowful work, yet in the 
removal about 4000 sunk under the trials, 
— about one in four of the whole number 
died. " Their sufferings were greatly aggra- 
vated by the conduct of lawless Georgians, 
who rushed ravenously into the country, seized 
the property of Cherokees, as soon as they 
were arrested, appropriated it to their own 
use, or sold it for a trifle to each other before 
the eyes of its owners ; thus reducing even 
the rich to absolute indigence, and depriving 
families of comforts which they were about to 
need in their long and melancholy march." 1 

We follow these wanderers and exiles from 
the white settlements with an intense sympa- 
thy and suspense. They have gone over the 
Mississippi, not merely under the pressure of 
Georgia, or of one President, or Secretary of 
1 "His. Am. Board,' ' p. 372. 



76 



the Indian's side 



War. Taking the most apologetic or sectional 
view of the case that can be taken, the re- 
moval, excepting certain atrocities in it, was a 
national removal, and, under the chronic pres- 
sure of two centuries, Congress indorsed it as 
the voice of the people, and in the line of an 
old adopted policy. Sharper points in that 
policy were then developed, but they were 
sustained. The opposition to them came from 
the older States, from which the Indians had 
been mostly removed, but the newer States, — 
through which there were yet scattered rem- 
nants of tribes, — and our border life and the 
wilder elements of the frontier prevailed. In 
long struggles over Indian issues these have 
always carried a majority. Neither Georgia, 
therefore, nor that Congress or administration 
is to be reproached preeminently. They were 
only an index, for the time, of a national 
spirit that two thirds of the country has some- 
how always made predominant. 



Section 7. — Another Morning Overclouded. 

But let us follow up the new experiment, 
inaugurated by the completion of the Chero- 
kee removal in 1838. A reservation was as- 
signed to them that now appears to be 7861 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



77 



square miles, — nearly as large as Massachu- 
setts. Schools and Indian agents, churches 
and ploughs, and human sympathies followed 
them ; also, white emigration, and speculators 
in wild lands, race prejudices, and whiskey, 
and semi-civilization. Into that total Indian 
Territory of 62,253 square miles, — nearly as 
large as eight States like Massachusetts, — and 
around the Cherokees, the government has 
located about forty tribes. Around this Ter- 
ritory we have also located — and since it was 
set apart for the Indians — the States of Mis- 
souri, Arkansas, Texas, and Kansas — young 
members in the American family, and full of 
the blood of youth and growth, and, of course, 
ambitious for good neighborhood. In the 
strong tide of emigration that has set toward 
the south-west, and specially since the war, this 
Indian Territory has lifted itself up in the cur- 
rent midway, and made it divide right and left. 

This is a condition exposed to any damaging 
influences that may go with our first waves of 
population, and if its people and natural re- 
sources decline assimilation and absorption in 
national interests, social and civil and com- 
mercial chafings must inevitably occur. It is 
quite likely to be the old Georgia case re- 
peated, unless Indian and white natures are 
much changed. What are the facts? 



78 



the Indian's side 



The Cherokee " nation," as the Cherokees 
greatly prefer to be called, has a government 
of its own, constituted by the elective fran- 
chise, and consisting of the legislative, judicial, 
and executive branches, and it has exclusive 
jurisdiction where all the parties are citizens of 
the nation. Mixed cases of red and white go 
to a white arbitrator, the agent of the general 
government for the Indian Territory, or to the 
United States Supreme Court, at Fort Smith, 
Arkansas. With 6000 whites living among 
the Indians, citizens of the United States, but 
not of the Territory where they live, it is not 
strange that the arbitrator is overborne with 
cases. 1 " The letters received from within the 
limits of the agency asking for information, 
decision, instruction, or advice, average from 
ten to fifteen daily." 2 

The disorder from intruding whites and from 
intermeddling ones over the border is a source 
of regret and complaint in almost every report. 
" The country continues to afford an asylum 
for refugees from justice from the States, and 

1 In the quotations immediately following, reference is 
sometimes made to the whole Indian Territory, and some- 
times only to the Cherokees. The text and context will 
readily locate the reference. 

2 " lieport of Commissioners of Indian Affairs," 1880; 
p. 94. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 79 

to invite the immigration of the very worst 
class of men that infest an Indian border." 1 

"Lawlessness and violence still continue in 
the Indian Territory. The two or three 
United States, marshalls, sent to enforce the 
intercourse laws by protecting Indians from 
white thieves and buffalo hunters, have been 
entirely inadequate," etc. 2 x 

"They are willing that the wild Indians 
from the plains shall be settled on their un- 
occupied lands, but they most emphatically 
object to the settlement of the wild white 
man from the States among them." " The 
intruders, as a class, are unfit to be in the 
Indian country, and some measures should be 
adopted that will rid these people of their pres- 
ence." "It is estimated that nine tenths of 
the crimes committed in the Territory are 
caused by whiskey, and its many aliases. It 
is introduced from the adjoining States, where 
it can be purchased in any quantity." " The 
band of desperadoes, whites and Indians, who 
made their headquarters in the western part of 
this agency, and beyond, and who were the 
terror of the whole country last year, have all 
been killed off, or placed in the penitentiary." 3 

"Such administration of the law in this 

1 " Report for 1875," p. 13. 2 "Report for 1874," p. 11. 
3 " Report for 1880," pp. 94, 95. 



80 



the Indian's side 



country as is possible through the United 
States district courts of Arkansas, scarcely 
deserves the name. Practically, therefore, we 
have a country embracing 62,253 square miles, 
inhabited by more than 75,000 souls, including 
50,000 civilized Indians, without the protection 
of law, and not infrequently the scene of vio- 
lence and wrong.'* 1 " This large population 
becomes more and more helpless under the 
increasing lawlessness among themselves, and 
the alarming intrusion of outlawed white men.'* 

From the tenor of the reports it would seem 
that the civilization of the Indians has not 
risen to even a second rank in national pur- 
pose. " The}" ought not to be left the prey to 
the worst influences which can be brought to 
them, in the life and example of the meanest 
white men. They deserve such guardianship 
and care, on the part of the United States, as 
will secure for them the powerful aid to eleva- 
tion which comes from the presence of law." 

What is said of low whites who enter the 
country to labor for the Choctaws and Chicka- 
saws has like bearing on the tribe whose second 
experiment we are tracing. "These whites, 
once in the country, are seldom known to 
leave, and thus their numbers are rapidly in- 
creasing. The result will be a mixture of the 
1 " Report, 1874, " pp. 11, 12. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 81 



lowest white blood with the Indian, thus prop- 
agating, instead of curing, the indolence and 
unthrift with which they are already cursed." 1 

Section 8. — Forebodings, and the Doom of the 
Reservation Theory. 

No one, of course, can be surprised that the 
Cherokees are haunted and paralyzed with the 
fear of another removal. If they were in the 
way of the whites when in their old home, 
much more may they suppose they now are, 
and if old treaties, compacts, and promises, 
and even decisions of the Supreme Court 
could not protect them in their homes and 
rights on the east of the Mississippi, why may 
they now expect it? The remark of the agent 
cannot be unexpected: "Their only fear is 
that the United States will forget her obliga- 
tions, and in some way deprive them of their 
lands. They do not seem to care for the loss 
in money value, so much as they fear the 
trouble, and the utter annihilation of a great 
portion of their people, if the whites are per- 
mitted to homestead in all portions of their 
country,, as is contemplated by so man}' of the 
measures before Congress." 2 
1 " Report for 1874," p. 71. 2 " Report for 1880," p. 94. 



82 THE INDIAN'S SIDE 

" They feel the pressure of the white man 
on every side, and, among the full-bloods 
especially, there is a growing apprehension 
that, before long, the barriers will give way, 
their country be overrun, and themselves dis- 
possessed." 1 

They may well have this apprehension, when 
the Indian Commissioner makes a point to 
show, and with much practical^'sense and force, 
that their separateness cannot long continue, 
and that 44 no Indian country can exist perpet- 
ually within the boundaries of this republic 
without becoming, in all essential particulars, a 
part of the United States." Many of those 
fears would be abated if the Cherokees could 
feel assured, not only that their land titles to 
single farms would be made as safe in title as a 
white man's, but that such white men would 
become their neighbors as would make those 
titles worth keeping, and be themselves such 
men as Indians could endure. Cherokee expe- 
rience had been the reverse of this. 

A very liberal use of official statement has 
now been made, that a fair view of the pres- 
ent condition of the Cherokees might be had. 
As government and paid agents are reporting 
their own work, we may presume that the 
view given by them is as favorable as the facts 
1 " Report for 1875/' p. 13. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



83 



will warrant. The state of the case is too pain- 
fully similar to the Georgia experiment to be 
satisfactory as a result or hopeful in its outlook. 
Surrounded by States, and pressed by the ris- 
ing tide of immigration ; infested and raided 
by miserable or unscrupulous whites ; railroads 
clamorous for right of way, and our multitud- 
inous white interests and energies standing on 
tip-toe to go in, pioneered by insatiable land- 
speculators, this second experiment with our 
leading tribe under the "reservation theory" 
seems to be nearly ended. What is obvious to 
us is almost experience to them, so fully is 
it in their fears and expectations. 

The official reports of both civil and benevo- 
lent work performed by the government and by 
religious bodies in the Indian Territory make 
one more satisfied and hopeful than a visit and 
personal observations. Our longest and most 
expensive experiment on the reservation theory, 
under the joint endeavors of statesmen and 
philanthropists, seems to have culminated in 
lifting the Indian to the saddle as a first-class 
stock-raiser. Together with this elevation he 
has obtained many of the best qualities of the 
citizen and Christian, while he is jet restrained 
by circumstances unfavorable to their develop- 
ment and practice. In 1880 we heard three 
eminent Indians address 2000 of their people 



84 



the Indian's side 



at their National Indian Fair at Muskogee. 
One was an ex-chief of the Cherokees, one was 
of the Supreme Bench of that nation, and the 
other a graduate of a New England college, 
and an eminent lawyer for some time in one of 
the western States. Their interests and pros- 
pects were freely and ably discussed on the 
stand. Farming was not a popular idea with 
the speakers or the audience, though the Cher- 
okees then had about 90,000 acres in rough 
agriculture. They declined the ownership of 
land in severalty and private farms in fee- 
simple, in memory of their experience on the 
east of the Mississippi, where they were called, 
with some propriety, " a nation of farmers." 
They were not disposed to prepare more farms 
for a second lottery. Hence their agricultural 
show at the Fair was meagre in the extreme, 
and their mechanical show was more so. This 
was sixty years after the government of the 
United States had presented to them, through 
General Jackson, two ploughs, six hoes, and 
six axes, and had promised a loom, six spinning- 
wheels, and as many pair of hand cards, and 
the American Board had commenced Christian- 
izing work among them. 

Of course they w^ere blinded by their painful 
memories of hard endeavors, discouragements, 
and failures to obtain the white man's civiliza- 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



85 



tion; they had no confidence in government 
indorsements and solemn treaties, when a 
white man's interests should overtake them. 
Yet there was evidently a despairing and 
growing acquiescence in the new policy of- 
fered, of land in severalty, citizenship, and 
the dissolution of the "nation." These par- 
ties were so evenly balanced and so warm 
on the new policy as to make its discussion 
perilous. Good sense, indifference, and de- 
spair have since given it a quiet majority. 

Evidently the Dawes Bill, the soul of which 
is the new policy, opens up to the brightest out- 
look into their ominous future. Others, how- 
ever, must do their hoping in it, and its success 
or failure will depend very much on the Indian's 
white neighbor. 



86 



the Indian's side 



CHAPTER III. 

INDIAN FARMING. 

Section 1. — Some Very Singular Assumptions. 

Indian farming has lately been put forward 
as a leading remedy for Indian troubles. It 
has been spoken of as if it were an industry 
unknown to the Indians, and might be made 
to work as a newly discovered expedient, to 
relieve both races, on this vexed question. 
The fact is overlooked that farming by the 
aborigines of America is as ancient as the 
Mound-Builders, that is, older than history, 
and that the leading grain now is Indian corn. 
Our newly discovered farming theory, for the ills 
of the poor aborigines, goes on the assumption 
that the Indians were never acquainted with 
this industry, have not practised it, and, so far 
as they can be made to understand it, are now 
averse to it. But what is the fact? 

Agriculture has been a leading industry in 
North America from pre-historic times. Among 
the Aztec ruins of Xew Mexico and Arizona, and 
in the extant pueblos, are abundant evidences 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



87 



of primitive and rudimental farming. " At the 
period of European discovery, maize was found 
cultivated and a staple article of food in a large 
part of North America and in parts of South 
America. There were also found beans, 
squashes, and tobacco, with the addition, in 
some areas, of peppers, tomatoes, cocoa, and 
cotton." Through the greater part of the San 
Juan region, New Mexico, there is " evidence 
of Indian occupation and cultivation," in its 
ancient prime. The writer brought up from 
that country very handsome specimens of corn 
from fields that bore the same before the Span- 
iards arrived there under De Vaca about 1536. 
The Mound-Builders have left good evidence 
that they were agricultural tribes. Before the 
Spaniards gave Christianity to the pueblo of 
Taos, its inhabitants had their fast days, ap- 
pointed by authority, much after the New Eng- 
land style, "for offering prayers to the Sun to 
supplicate him to repeat his diurnal visits, and 
to continue to make the maize, beans, and 
squashes grow, for the sustenance of the 
people." The Mandans of the upper Missouri 
had their high scaffolds for drying corn and 
vegetables. Beyond Bismarck, where the Nor- 
thern Pacific Railroad crosses the Missouri, 
the Indians have raised corn from ancient 
time. " That the culture of this grain has 



88 



the Indian's side 



been carried on by the aborigines from a very 
remote period, is shown by the fact that nume- 
rous fossilized and many charred corn-cobs, in 
a perfect state of preservation, are still found 
in the excavated bluffs along the river and 
very deep down in the oldest mounds." 1 Sir 
Richard Grenville, visiting the Indian towns 
in Virginia before the days of Jamestown, 1585, 
says : " Their corn they plant in rows, for it 
grows so large, with thick stalk and broad 
leaves, that one plant would stint the other, 
and it would never arrive at maturity. In the 
fields they erect a stage in which a sentry is 
stationed to guard against the depredations of 
birds and thieves. " When Dankers and Sluy- 
ter visited the Long Island Indians in 1679-80, 
they gave them corn-bread, the grain being 
unripe, coarsely broken, and half-baked — the 
prototype of colonial samp. When Green- 
balgh visited an Iroquois settlement at the 
outlet of Honeoye Lake, N. Y., in 1677, he 
says : " They have a good store of corn grow- 
ing to the northward of the town." 

This town was situated at Mendon, near 
Rochester, and the old author says : " It con- 
tains about 120 houses, being the largest of all 
the houses we saw, the ordinary being fifty or 

1 li Northern Pacific Railroad Guide," by Henry I. Winser, 
18S3 : p. 118. 



f 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 89 



sixty feet long, with twelve and thirteen fires 
in one house. . . . From the roof-poles were 
suspended their strings of corn in the ear, 
braided by the husks, also strings of dried 
squashes and pumpkins. Spaces were con- 
trived here and there to store away their ac- 
cumulations of provisions." 1 x 

Section 2. — Early Indian Farming in New 
England, Neiv York, Missouri, Neiv Mexico, 
Georgia, Minnesota, Dakota, Canada, Mich- 
igan, Iowa, and Florida. 

The agricultural habits of the New England 
Indians when white men first came among 
them is well shown by Roger Williams, in his 
" Key to the Language of America," written in 
1643. He speaks of their " parch'd meal, which 
is a readie very wholesome food, which they 
eat with a little water hot or cold. I have 
travelled with neere 200 of them at once, neere 
100 miles through the woods, every man carry- 
ing a little Basket of this at his back, and 
sometimes in a hollow Leather Girdle about his 
middle, sufficient for a man for three or four 

1 '* Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines." 
By Lewis H. Morgan. Vol. iv. of Contributions to No. 
Am. Ethnology, U. S. Department of the Interior, pp. 116, 
120, 123, 129, 151, 192-3. 



90 



the Indian's side 



daies." " The come of the Countrey, with 
which they are feci from the wombe." " Their 
Women constantly beat all their corne with 
hand ; they plant it, dresse it, gather it, barne 
it, beat it, and take as much paines as any 
people in the world." " Against the Birds, the 
Indians are very carefull. . . . They put up 
little watch-houses in the middle of their fields, 
in which they, or their biggest children, lodge, 
and early in the morning prevent the birds, " 
etc. Speaking of strawberries he says: " The 
Indians bruise them in a Morter, and mixe 
them with meale and make strawberry bread." 
" There be diverse sorts of this Corne and of the 
colours." "Where a field is to be broken, they 
have a very loving, sociable, speedy way to 
dispatch it. All the neighbours, men and 
Women, forty, fifty, a hundred, &c, joyne, 
and come in to helpe freely." " The Women 
of the Family will commonly raise two or three 
heaps of twelve, fifteene, or twentj^ bushells a 
heap, which they drie in broad, round heaps." 1 

An early author thus speaks of the new vil- 
lage of Onondaga, New York. The old one was 
burned by the occupants when they fled before 
Count Frontenac, in 1696. " The town in its 
present state is about two or three miles long, 

1 " Coll. of the R. I. His. Soc," vol. i. pp. 33, 50, 59, 85, 
90, 91, 92, 93. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



91 



yet the scattered cabins on both sides of the 
water are not above forty in number ; many of 
them hold two families, but all stand single, so 
that the whole town is a strange mixture of 
cabins, interspersed with great patches of high 
grass, bushes, and shrubs, some of peas, corn, 
and squashes." 1 

The following evidence of Indian agriculture 
in the Ohio comes in sad form, but we give 
it : " About the middle of October, General 
Harmar moved on the Indian towns on the 
Miami. The Indians had fled, and he ordered 
the towns to be burnt, the fruit trees, of which 
there was a large number, to be girdled, and 
every description of property, including at least 
20,000 bushels of corn, to be destroyed." 2 

The Mandans on the upper Missouri were 
once renowned in frontier Indian history. 
They built timber-framed houses. The timber 
for these was in the low bottom-lands, and at 
quite a distance often ; yet they cut and framed 
it without metal tools, and moved it without 
animal hauling. Between the lodges were 
their drying scaffolds, one for each lodge. 
Each scaffold was about twenty feet long, 

1 "Travels to Onondaga," London Ed., 1751; pp. 49, 50. 
Quoted by Morgan, as above, p. 123. 

2 Judge Burnet's "Xotes on the Early Settlement of the 
North-west Territory," p. 103. 



92 



the ixdian's side 



twelve feet wide, and seven feet high, up to the 
flooring. Here they placed for drying their 
corn, meat, vegetables, and skins. " 1 

In his notes on New Mexico, General Emory 
says that u the Maricopas occupy thatched cot- 
tages, thirty or forty feet in diameter, made 
of twigs of cotton-wood trees interwoven with 
straw of wheat, cornstalks and cane/' 

" The Mahas seem very friendly to the whites, 
and cultivate corn, beans, melons, squashes, and 
a small species of tobacco." 2 

Major Amos Stoddard was our first governor 
of the Upper Louisiana, taking charge when 
the Territory was transferred to the United 
States. Speaking of one Delaware and two 
Shawnee villages in the present Missouri, in 
1794. he says : " The houses of all the villages 
are built of logs, some of them squared and 
well interlocked at the ends, and covered with 
shingles. Many of them are two stories high, 
and attached to them are small houses for the 
preservation of corn, and barns for the shelter 
of cattle and horses, with which they are well 
supplied. Their houses are well furnished with 
decent and useful furniture.' 5 3 Poor remnants 

1 Morgan, ut supra, pp. 125-129. 

2 Bradbury's "Travels in the Interior of North America," 
1809-11 ; p. 69. 

3 Stoddard's " Sketches of Louisiana," p. 215. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



93 



of these two tribes are now found in the Ind- 
ian Territory. 

The treaty of Greenville was hastened by the 
great victory which General Wayne gained over 
the Indians, in August, 1794. In moving irre- 
sistibly on to that triumph — General Wayne 
had gained from the Indians the name of Big 
Wind, or Cyclone, by the force and speed of 
his marching — he swept through the heart of 
Indian civilization in the primitive Ohio. " The 
extensive and highly cultivated fields and gar- 
dens, which appeared on every side, exhibited 
the work of many hands. The margins of the 
beautiful rivers Au Glaice and Miami had the 
appearance of a continued village, for several 
miles above and below their junction. They 
were covered with extensive cornfields, and 
gardens containing a great variety of vegeta- 
ble productions." 1 

In Judd's " History of Hadley, Mass.," the 
estimate of Indian cornfields between Mount 
Tom and Sugar Loaf, on both sides of the 
Connecticut, falls somewhat within seventy 
acres, and, in the Pynchon purchase, one field 
of about sixteen acres, in Hadley, was reserved 
by the natives. A part of the payment was 
the ploughing of this amount, and probably 
this field. 

1 Burnet's " Notes on the Early Settlement of the North- 
west Territory," p. 169. 



94 



the Indian's side 



In the winter of 1623, the Pilgrims, hard 
pressed for food, made a tour among the Ind- 
ians for corn, and having purchased more than 
they could take back to Plymouth, Standish 
was sent for it the next month, and " also to 
purchase more at the same place." Drake says 
that " The Muskogees (Creeks) had an excel- 
lent regulation ; namely, the men assisted the 
women in the planting before setting out on 
their warlike and other expeditions." 1 

The same author speaks of beautiful corn- 
fields along the Oakmulge, to the extent of 
twenty miles. Even at the Gaspe, far north, 
Cartier found the farm products, in 1534 and 
following. When he moored near Montreal, a 
thousand Indians welcomed him, and threw 
fish and corn-bread into his boats. In the 
approach to the city the next day, " we began 
to finde goodly and large cultivated fieldes, 
full of such corne as the countrie yeeldeth 
. . . wherewith they live even as we doe with 
our wheat. . . . They have also on the top of 
their houses certain granaries, wherein they 
keepe their corne to make their bread withall. 
. . . They make also sundry sorts of pottage 
with the said corne, and also of peas and beans, 
whereof they have great store, as also with 
other fruits, great cowcumbers and other fruits, 
brake's "Indians," bk. iv. 



OF THE INDTAN QUESTION. 



95 



. . . These people are given to no other exer- 
cise, but onely to husbandrie and fishing for 
their sustenance." 1 

" The Iroquois have alwaj^s been an agricul- 
tural people. Their extensive plantations of 
maize, beans, and pumpkins excited the admi- 
ration of the first explorers. Since their re- 
moval to Canada, their industry and aptitude 
as farmers have been notable. The wheat mar- 
ket of Brantford has, for many years, been 
largely supplied from the Reserve " — the 
Grand River Reserve, in the Province of On- 
tario. 2 

In 1809, Colonel Visger, government agent 
for the Indians in the vicinity of Detroit, re- 
ported that the Wyandottes " had planted 160 
acres of corn, and two individuals had sown 
12 acres of wheat ; that farming utensils were 
in great demand, and that successful experi- 
ments in agriculture had been made in six 
villages of Indians within forty miles of De- 
troit." In 1884, the Wyandottes had been re- 
moved to the Indian Territory, and numbered 
284, and were occupying 40 dwelling-houses. 

Under date of February 16, 1806, Lieutenant 
Pike makes this entry in his narrative : " The 
Sauks and Reynards are planting corn and 

1 Cartier's " Narrative," 1534 et seq., Hakluyt's Trans. 

2 "Mag. of Am. His.," 1885; p. 120. 



96 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



raising cattle." 1 In 1819 the L'Abre Indians 
" sent to the Mackinaw market more than 1000 
bushels of corn, for which they received payment 
in money or goods. In some years they have 
sent more than 3000 bushels. They use the 
hoe only, in cultivating their lands, having no 
ploughs, oxen, cows, nor, but in a single 
instance, horses." "On Menominee River is 
the only permanent village possessed by the 
Menominees, where corn, potatoes, pumpkins, 
squashes, etc., are raised." Then they numbered 
3900 ; now 1450. " The Winnebagoes will suf- 
fer no encroachment (1820) upon their soil, 
nor any persons to pass through it without 
giving a satisfactory explanation of their mo- 
tives and intentions. In failing to comply 
with this peremptory style, their lives would 
be in danger. They cultivate corn, potatoes, 
pumpkins, squashes and beans, and are remark- 
ably provident. They possess no horses." 
Their number then was 5800 ; now 2144. 
44 The whole of Fox River was owned and 
occupied by the Sauks and Foxes more than 
a century since. Many traces of fields culti- 
vated by them are still visible." This was 
also in 1820. They then numbered 6500 ; 
now they are broken up into five locations, 

1 Pike's " Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi,' ' 
etc. j Appendix, vol. i. p. 19. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



97 



and number 924 souls. The principal Fox vil- 
lage was where Davenport now stands, oppo- 
site Rock Island, and where they had about 
300 acres under cultivation, and raised from 
7000 to 8000 bushels of corn, besides other 
cereals and vegetables. Fort Armstrong was 
on the island, and traders were among them, 
where they found an annual market for about 
1000 bushels of corn, 1000 pounds of beeswax, 
3000 pounds of feathers, and about 275,000 
pounds of deer tallow. The winter hunt for 
1819-20 of the two tribes, including peltries 
delivered at Fort Edwards, was valued at 
$58,800. And this primitive agriculture ex- 
tended from the Hochelaga of the Indians, the 
Mount Roiall of Cartier, Montreal, to the Gulf 
of Mexico. "The Towacano, or Panis nation 
(near the Gulf), live in villages, cultivate the 
soil, and pursue the chase." 1 

Captain John H. Bell, agent for the Florida 
Indians, reported in 1820 : " The pure Semi- 
nole Indians live in houses of wood, constructed 
like those of white people. . . . They raise 
corn with the hoe, having no ploughs in the 
country. . . . These Indians have negro slaves, 
who live in separate families. They raise corn 

1 " Report of Jedidiah Morse, D.D., to John C. Calhoun, 
Sec. of War," 1820. Appendix, pp. 17, 24, 47, 48, 51, 152-7, 
259. 309-10. 



98 



the Indian's side 



for tfteir subsistence ; if they have a surplus, it 
goes to the families of their masters. . . . One 
Indian, called Friday, who is an industrious 
man, cultivates and fences his lands, splits 
rails, etc., but is laughed at and discarded by 
his neighbors, because he 4 works like a negro.' 
When they see this man at work, they ex- 
claim : 1 Are we reduced to this degraded 
state?' They are unwilling to leave their 
country." 

It would, of course, be unreasonable to call 
the aborigines of this country an agricultural 
people in the ordinary sense, and equally so to 
deny that they had the primitive elements of 
agriculture, propensities to it, and many habits 
and practices of it. That bas-relief panel in 
the Capitol at "Washington, of the Landing of 
the Pilgrims, where an Indian offers them an 
ear of corn, is an emblem true to history. The 
symbol properly associates the Indian with 
Indian corn, declarative of the general fact 
that before the white man came, America was 
a cornfield, and the red man worked it. When 
Red Jacket was on a visit to his Great Father, 
and they showed him this panel picture, he 
must have felt the truth it set forth to his eye, 
and it would not be strange if the old chief had 
some painful reflections over the way in which 
the white strangers have responded to that 
generous welcome. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



99 



In speaking of the North American Indians 
as a whole, Bancroft says : " All the tribes 
south of the St. Lawrence, except remote ones 
on the north-east and the north-west, cultivated 
the earth. Unlike the people of the Old World, 
they were at once hunters and tillers of the 
ground." 1 

In this resume of Indian agriculture, a few 
items should be considered in connection with 
the scheme to turn the Indians from the chase 
to the farm. The early explorers and settlers 
found them tilling the ground to this extent, 
and resuming it will be no novelty. The prod- 
ucts of their cultivation extended to a variety 
of articles, and they were careful in their means 
of preservation. Some had timber-framed 
houses, like those of white people, though 
they were destitute of tools of metal or ani- 
mals for hauling. They dared cultivation in 
the far north, where now the whites are much 
discouraged in the same work. Cartier repre- 
sents them as confining themselves to hus- 
bandry and fishing for a living. In some cases 
they cultivated for the white market, though 
confined to the hoe only, and their crops went 
up to thousands of bushels. Some pushed 
farming enterprise to such an extent as to 
own and employ slaves as plantation hands. 
1 "His. U. S.," vol. iii. p. 271. 



100 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



This should be regarded as ultimate evidence 
of the Indian's capacity and willingness to be a 
farmer. If the ardor has died out and the pur- 
suit ceased, which Bancroft represents as gen- 
eral south of the St. Lawrence, we may be 
able to find the causes. We may work, there- 
fore, in the hope of removing the causes and of 
restoring the pursuit. Happy indeed if we 
could also reinstate the honor and honesty 
which Bradbury ascribed to them : " I never 
heard of a single instance of a white man 
being robbed, or having anything stolen from 
him, in an Indian village." 1 

With this agrees an interesting incident, 
which Bradbury details on page 190 of his 
narrative. One Richardson came down the 
Missouri with him, and seemed to anticipate 
life again within civilization. When Bradbury 
was sick in St. Louis, Richardson called on 
him, and among other things said: "I find so 
much deceit and selfishness among white men 
that I am already tired of them. The arrow- 
head, which is not yet extracted, pains me 
when I chop wood. Whiskey I cannot drink, 
and bread and salt I do not care about. I will 
go again amongst the Indians." 

1 " Travels of John Bradbury in the Interior of Xorth 
America," 1S09-11; p. 167. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



101 



Section 3. — The best Indian Farms the far- 
thest from White Neighborhood. 

It is to be noticed that these Indian fields 
now named were far in advance and at wide 
remove from the white settlements, and that 
they have disappeared with the approach of 
the immigrants. So Bancroft recognizes farm- 
ing among the Pokanokets of King Philip, 
before the intrusion of the whites. Then, " as 
the English villagers drew nearer and nearer to 
them . . . their best fields for planting corn 
were gradually alienated " ; " repeated sales of 
land had narrowed their domains . . . and as 
wave after wave succeeded they found them- 
selves deprived of their broad acres." 1 

The Merrimac, Connecticut, and Hudson 
valleys saw, from time to time, the Indian 
fields staked off into white men's farms, while 
the original owners moved on. When Lieu- 
tenant Pike was exploring the upper Missis- 
sippi, in 1806, he found fine cornfields, where 
are now magnificent wheat fields. He obtained 
a grant of 100,000 acres, including the Falls of 
St. Anthony, for two hundred dollars' worth of 
presents and sixty gallons of spirits, and in 
his Report to the War Office, he says, with 
i "His. U. S." ii. 99. 



102 



the Indian's side 



charming simplicity, " You will perceive that 
we have obtained about 100,000 acres, equal to 
$200,000, for a song." 1 

Very true. St. Anthony and St. Paul and 
Minneapolis look better and are better than 
Indian cornfields. Still, it is well enough 
to notice why the Indians gave up farming 
there. The regions around Detroit and Mack- 
inaw have become fruitful and most beautiful 
in the farms and towns and cities of white 
men, but we are false to history if we trace 
the changes only to Indian indolence and un- 
thrift. 

From colonial times hitherto we have had 
the national theory of Indian reservations with 
some agricultural hope, and at the same time 
the national practice of breaking them up. 
The encroachment of the whites on the Ind- 
ians, and the appropriation of their lands, by 
treaty, purchase, exchange, or force, has quite 
destroyed their even poor practice of farming, 
and any ambition for it. Their constant re- 
movals from old homes to a farther front have 
made them hopeless and heartless. No white 
race, certainly not Americans, would follow up 
farming in such circumstances. 

It is pleasant to enter one exception to the 

1 "Pike's Expedition,' ' Appendix, pt. i. p. 10, Supple- 
ment, p. 25. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



103 



general rule that the whites encroach on the 
cultivated grounds of the Indians and expel 
them. The question was put to one, long 
and widely familiar with Indian life in the far 
West, and he made this reply to me, on the 
willingness and aptness of the Indian to culti- 
vate the land : — 

"From the Shoshones here in Wyoming and 
west, they take kindly to it, and are anxious 
to learn. Sagwitche, a Ute, left his tribe, went 
to farming with fifty others, and he raised 
1300 bushels of small grains. This was in 
Thistle Valley, Utah. The white settlers re- 
tired from the Indians, and a contribution paid 
them off for the improvements which they 
left." 

And to another related question the same 
gentleman made this reply : " The whites, bor- 
dering, lack the civilization to get along well 
with the Indians. The kinder the whites are, 
the kinder the Indians." It may not be im- 
proper to add that if the Indians had published 
as many papers as the whites, in their propor- 
tion, we of the East would now have quite 
different opinions of the Indians and of their 
white neighbors. 



104 



the Indian's side 



Section 4. — The Encroachments of Immigrants 
and the Violations of Treaties, as related to 
Indian Farming. 

As to the keeping and breaking of Indian 
treaties, Senator Dawes is reported as making 
this strong statement in a senatorial debate, in 
April, 1880 : " Government has never kept its 
promises to the Indians, and there are no indi- 
cations that it ever will." 

Some time since, Indian Inspector Pollock 
gave this testimony before a committee of the 
Senate : — 

The Indians have " almost uniformly ob- 
served treaty obligations, when they under- 
stood them, while, on the other hand, to the 
best of his knowledge and belief, scarcely one 
of over 360 entered into with the Indians by 
the government had ever been fulfilled in ac- 
cordance with its terms, and many of them 
had been grossly violated." 

The Indian Commissioner for 1872 gen- 
eralizes the reasons for breaking old treaties, 
and granting new reservations, in this man- 
ner : — 

" These treaties were made from time to 
time, as the pressure of white settlements or 
the fear or the experience ot Indian hostilities 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 105 



made the demand for the removal of one 
tribe after another urgent or imperative." 1 

Mr. Walker, quoted above, says of the causes 
for making new reservations : " There is scarcely 
one of the 92 reservations at present estab- 
lished (1874) on which white men have not- 
effected a lodgement ; many swarm with squat- 
ters, who hold their place by intimidating 
the rightful owners ; while in more than one 
case the Indians have been wholly dispossessed, 
and are wanderers upon the face of the 
earth." 2 

And to see what our government treaties 
and reservations amount to, and how we 
discourage the Indians in any tendencies to 
agriculture, settlements, and civilization, let a 
few cases be cited: — 

" The progress of the Indians in Michigan in 
civilization and industry has been greatly hin- 
dered in the past by a feeling of uncertainty 
in regard to their permanent possession and 
enjoyment of their homes." 3 

Of the Mille Lac Chippewas, he says : 
" Their present reservation is rich in fine 
lands, the envy of lumber dealers, and there 

1 " Report on Indian Affairs," 1873, pp. 83-4. 

2 "The Indian Question," by Francis A. Walker, 1874; 
p. 76. 

3 Ibid., Ind. Ques., 154. 



106 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



is a strong pressure on all sides for their 
early removal." 1 

In the Minnesota and Sioux War of 1862. 
the Winnebagoes remained friendly to the 
whites, yet, says Mr. Walker, " the people 
were so determined that all Indians should 
be removed beyond the limits of the State 
that Congress, in 1863, passed an act provid- 
ing for their removal/' 2 

Mr. Walker speaks of the Pimas and Mari- 
copas in Arizona as peaceful, loyal, and consid- 
erably advanced in certain features of agricul- 
ture and civilization, and then adds : 44 The 
relations of these bands with the neighboring 
whites are, however, very unfavorable to their 
interests, and the condition of affairs is fast 
growing worse." 3 

Of the Indians in Washington Territory, he 
remarks : 44 Owing to the influx of whites, 
many of them have been crowded out, and 
some of them have had their own unquestion- 
able improvements forcibly wrested from 
them." 4 

Those in the Round Valley agency 44 are 
uniformly quiet and peaceable, notwithstand- 
ing that they are much disturbed by the white 
trespassers . . . who are all clamorous for 

1 Ibid., Ind. Ques., 170. 2 Ibid.. Ind. Ques., 178- 
3 Ibid., Ind. Ques., 242. 4 Ibid., Ind. Ques., 255. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



107 



breaking up the reservation and driving the 
Indians out." 1 

Summarily the Commissioner concludes : 
4 * Every State, and every Territory that aspires 
to become a State, will strive to keep the 
Indians as far as possible from its own borders ; 
while powerful combinations of speculators 
will make their fight for the last acre of Ind- 
ian lands. 2 

An Indian hunt in California, within 1851-4, 
as described by an English writer and traveller 
there, will serve like a picture to show the 
feelings of white border men toward the 
Indians. A white man had been killed by the 
Indians about twelve miles from Hangtown, 
now Placerville. Four white men going to 
recover the body and " hunt" the Indians were 
repulsed. " The next day crowds of miners 
flocked in from all quarters, each man equipped 
with a long rifle, in addition to his bowie 
knife and revolver, while two men, playing a 
drum and fife, marched up and down the 
streets to give a military air to the occasion. 
A public meeting was held in one of the gam- 
bling rooms, at which the governor, the sheriff 
of the county, and other big men of the place 
were present. The miners about Hangtown 
were mostly Americans, and a large proportion 
1 Ibid., Ind. Ques., 264-5. 2 Ibid., Ind. Ques., 119, 120. 



108 



the Indian's side 



of them were from the United States, who had 
come by the overland route across the plains — 
men who had all their lives been used to Ind- 
ian wiles and treachery, and thought about 
as much of shooting an Indian as of killing 
a rattlesnake. They were a rough-looking 
crowd, long, gaunt, wiry men, dressed in the 
usual old flannel-shirt costume of miners, with 
shaggy beards, thin faces, hands and arms as 
brown as mahogany, and with an expression 
about their eyes which boded no good to any 
Indian who should come within range of their 
rifles. . . . The speech of a Kentuckian doctor 
was quite a treat. . . . The governor also 
made a short speech, taking the responsibility 
of raising a company of one hundred men, at 
five dollars a day, to go and whip the Indians. 
The sheriff followed. . . . Those who wished 
to enlist were then told to come round to the 
other end of the room, when nearly the whole 
crowd rushed eagerly forward, and the required 
number was at once enrolled.'' The hunt 
lasted two months. 1 

With a singular and shocking coolness, Borth- 
wick adds the following confessions and reflec- 
tions : " Their presence is not compatible with 
that of a civilized community, and as the coun- 

l " Three Years in California." B. J. D. Borthwick, 
1851-4; pp. 132-6. 



OF THE INDIAK QUESTION. 



109 



try becomes more thickly settled there will be 
no longer room for them. Their country can 
be made subservient to man, but as they them- 
selves cannot be turned to account, they must 
move off and make way for their betters. This 
may not be very good morality, but it is the 
way of the world, and the aborigines of Califor- 
nia are not likely to share a better fate than 
those of many another country." In view of 
such facts and such morality, the figures follow- 
ing need no explanation. By the official census 
of California in 1823, the number of Indians 
was 100,826 ; in 1880, it was 16,277. The "In- 
dian Hunt " was midway between the two dates. 

This last passage quoted from Commissioner 
Walker calls up painful memories of what fol- 
lowed the close of King Philip's War. " There 
followed a bitter contention of colonists for 
shares in the conquered territory." 1 

Few persons realize how frequent these re- 
movals to new reservations have been, and how 
many the treaties with some tribes, usually on 
account of land. This crowding the Indians 
to new homes is historic and chronic, ancient 
and modern with us. 

While among the Cherokees in 1880, I found 
their head men under the discouraging convic- 
tion that they could not remain there perma- 
1 Freeman's " Aborigines " from 1620, p. 166. 



110 



the Indian's side 



nantly, and so but little interest was taken in 
permanent improvements. Six sevenths of 
their dwellings were log-houses, huts, shanties, 
and caves. 

Some of our acquisitions were made in colo- 
nial weakness and timidity, as our first treaty 
with Indians was made by the Plymouth 
Colony, in 1621. Our Dutch fathers ran a wall 
across Manhattan Island, in 1653, to keep the 
Indians out of New York, thereby gaining a 
part of the island, and beginning the present 
Wall Street, so called from that old Indian 
wall. Later treaties show all the grotesque 
combination of farce and tragedy in the appear- 
ance and acts of the two " high contracting 
parties." We have met the blanketed and 
clouted red man with all pomp and circum- 
stance, in ridiculous imitation of ambassadors 
at Versailles, in the court of Louis XIV. 

With all this, however, it should be said 
that there was a show r of right and a symbol of 
equity. It was a recognition, on the part of 
the United States, of the limited possessory 
rights of the aborigines to the soil, and of a 
body of Indians as a nation or civil power. 
From the adoption of the constitution to 
March 3, 1871, our government indulged in 
the phantom of Indian nationalities, and went 
through the motions of treaty-making with 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



Ill 



them, but at that elate Congress forbade such 
recognition or style of intercourse. Between 
those two dates, and it should be formally 
stated to the credit of the goverment, the 
United States, by at least 372 treaties, ac- 
quired from the Indians all land to which a 
tribe could show any fair claim, and which is 
now in the possession of the government. Of 
course there has been fraud and crowding and 
intimidation at times, but the form of treaty 
has been preserved. Noah Webster speaks of 
" the indispensable necessity of securing the 
Indian treaties from the outrageous frauds to 
which they are exposed by their unrestrained 
intercourse with traders destitute of all moral 
principle." 1 With the single exception of the 
Sioux case, after the Minnesota massacre of 
1862, our government has always acquired 
Indian lands by contract and not conquest. 2 

Section 5. — British Columbia and its Ind- 
ians* 

The English author, above quoted, Borth- 
wick, is sustained in such repulsive views by 
the English government itself in dealing with 

1 " The First An. Rep. of the Am. Soc. for Promoting the 
Civilization and General Improvement of the Indian Tribes 
in the U. S.," p. 30, 1824. 

2 "Ind. Com. Report," 1872, pp. 83,84. 



112 



the Indian's side 



an Indian tribe in British Columbia. The case 
is here cited, not simply to show that the 
author is sustained by the example of his own 
government, but that the recognition of Indian 
rights is no necessary part of a so-called Chris- 
tian civilization. 

British Columbia is assumed to have had, 
within recent times, 30,000 Indians, of whom 
some tribes were so grossly pagan and barbar- 
ous as to be even cannibals. It is almost im- 
possible to describe the brutal and bloody and 
animal degradation of some of them. In 1857 
Mr. William Duncan, an English philanthro- 
pist and lay Christian, entered into the work 
of civilizing one of the most corrupt and vio- 
lent of them. The tribe was of the Tsim- 
shean stock, and had a home near Fort Simpson, 
a trading-post of the Hudson Bay Company. 
They regarded him as throwing his life away 
by exposing himself among them, and they 
sought to hold him back from an almost cer- 
tain and horrible end. 

After spending five years among them he 
succeeded in winning about fifty of them to a 
tolerable adoption of the leading principles and 
practices of a Christian civilization. This was 
accomplished while, at the same time, he was 
introducing among them the simpler and ruder 
mechanics, and temporal comforts of ordinary 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 113 



white border men. He was fortunate in find- 
ing, near to Fort Simpson, a settlement of 2300 
of these Indians, who, unlike our later and 
nomadic tribes, lived a village life, in separate 
and permanent houses. 

Of course it was quite impossible to deal 
very successfully with these reforming ones 
while they were in constant association with 
the 2000 and more who persisted in maintain- 
ing their pagan practices and barbarous habits. 
Mr. Duncan, therefore, withdrew the Christian 
Indians into a colony by themselves, about 
seventeen miles from the post, and to a tide- 
water location and old village site, called Met- 
lakahtla. The new town covered two acres of 
land, and was laid out into lots 60 by 120 feet. 
It was within an old reservation of their own, as 
the Indians supposed, of about 70,000 acres. It 
had, finally, a church seating 1200 people, a 
town hall, dispensary, reading-room, market, a 
blacksmith, carpenter, cooper, and tinshop, 
a work-shop and soap-factory. . A system of 
civil government was organized by themselves, 
a school-room was provided, as also a village 
store, by themselves, and the profits were 
turned in for the town fund and general good. 
The colony grew to the number of about 
1000, and was orderh^, prosperous, and was 
fairly growing in intelligence and morality. 



114 



the Indian's side 



Its influence was widely felt on the wild tribes 
around. Even the Chilkats, a fierce tribe in 
Alaska, came 600 miles to see the wonder, and 
asked to see the book which had done so much 
to work the wonder. When the Bible was 
produced, and its power explained, each of the 
wild Alaskans touched it reverently with the 
tip of his finger, exclaiming, "Ahm! ahm ! " 
It is good ! it is good ! 

A thrifty village business sprang up, of a 
domestic kind, and some foreign, specially 
in canned salmon. Then border and harpy 
traders, who hang everywhere on the sel- 
vage and thrums of civilization, and keep 
just in advance of the Decalogue, forced them- 
selves on this comparative Eden in the great 
north land. As this primitive planting of a 
better life had a government in and of itself, 
and as weak as it was sovereign, Mr. Duncan 
found it exceedingly difficult to protect it 
from decivilizing influences of poorly civilized 
whites, — Hudson Ba}^ traders on the one side, 
and coasters on the other. The simple colo- 
nists were constantly tempted to the lowest 
vices, usually led in by vicious whiskey. 

Mr. Duncan had not seen the way clear as 
yet to introduce the church proper, with* its 
creeds and ceremonials, but had directed his 
labors mainly to secure an every-day moral 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



115 



and Christian life. This plan did not com- 
mend itself to the resident officials of the 
Church Missionary Society, which had been 
somewhat auxiliary to the growth of the enter- 
prise, and they therefore sought to embody the 
colony in the general church organization for 
British Columbia, and put it under the cere- 
monies and rituals of their form of Christianity. 
Still Mr. Duncan preferred to keep these simple 
and devout natives for the present to a few great 
and good points of daily life, which keep one 
so close to the sources of spiritual power and 
to the simplicity of the apostolic forms of 
Christianity. 

Then the bishop assumed to occupy the 
colony as a mission, and took ecclesiastical 
control, while yet nine tenths of the colonists 
adhered to Mr. Duncan as their redeemer from 
paganism and cannibalism, and as their teacher 
and spiritual father, and the civil founder of 
their prosperous State. Then was illustrated 
that critical saying of Bishop Patterson : " I 
have for years thought that we seek in our mis- 
sions a great deal too much to make English 
Christians." 

The missionary society had some claim on 
the buildings because of some contributions 
toward their erection, but when, because of this, 
they wished to encumber these natives in their 



116 



the Indian's side 



simple piety with an elaborate and stately wor- 
ship, depose their pastor and impose one not 
of their choice, they objected, and asked the 
society to remove the buildings (jointly owned) 
if they would, and leave the Indians in peace- 
able possession of their own two acres of land. 

This brought the question of title to the 
land to the front, and the native Christians 
wrote to the society as follows : " The God of 
heaven, who created man upon the earth, gave 
this land to our forefathers, some of whom once 
lived on these very two acres, and we have re- 
ceived the land by direct succession from them. 
No man-made law can justly take from us this, 
the gift of Him who is the source of all true 
law and justice. Relying on this, the highest 
of all titles, we claim our land, and notify the 
society, through you, its deputies, to move off 
the two acres." 

In giving this notice they relied on what 
the Governor-General of the Dominion of 
Canada, Earl Dufferein, had said, in a speech 
on the land question, in 1876, at Victoria : " In 
Canada, no government, whether provincial or 
central, has failed to acknowledge that the 
original title to the lands existed in the Indian 
tribes. Before we touch an acre we make a 
treaty, and having agreed upon and paid the 
stipulated price, we enter into possession." 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



117 



The Metlakahtlans also laid their grievances, 
as to title, before the Superintendent of Indian 
Affairs, as one branch of the government, and 
with much confidence of success. He advised 
that the Church Missionary Society withdraw 
and leave the Indians in peaceable possession, as 
of their own land. Yet the government took 
no steps, nor did the society accede to the 
official judgment. When another notice was 
served on the bishop to remove, the government 
came to the defence of the society, and in- 
formed the Indians that they had no rights 
whatever in the land, but that the title 
rested in the queen. Then, government sur- 
veyors appeared to bound off, and cut up the 
two acres, that it might be secured formally to 
the Church Missionary Society, through the 
bishop. The powerless natives next took coun- 
sel of an eminent lawyer at Victoria, who gave 
opinion " that the Indians cannot be molested in 
the possession of lands occupied by them prior 
to the advent of white men, unless in pur- 
suance of treaties duly entered into by them." 

This opinion was obtained by a visit to 
Victoria, 600 miles away. Then, to secure 
their rights and to settle all difficulties amica- 
bly by a direct arrangement with government, 
a deputation of these Indians went to Ottawa, 
a round trip of 7000 miles. This was in 



118 



the Indian's side 



the summer of 1885, and they brought back 
promises that all their grievances should be 
lifted. But the hopes thus given were not 
to be realized. The question of title was 
traced back to the terms of union on which 
British Columbia came into the Canadian 
Dominion, in 1871. When that union was 
consummated, British Columbia had about 
60,000 people, of whom one half were abo- 
rigines. The province contained 390,344 
square miles — about three times the area 
of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. 
Of all this, ten square miles only were re- 
served for the Indians — about two acres 
apiece ! It appeared to be a deep scheme 
to put that immense domain within the reach 
of land-hungry speculators, — a huge Indian- 
ring. The plans to reserve even the poor 
remnant to the Indians lacked definiteness 
and real worth; for in 1875 the minister of 
justice reported that there w T ere no reserva- 
tions in British America, while the govern- 
ment had obtained no surrenders from the 
native occupants. The government simply 
assumed possession in a declarative way. More 
recently, the Chief Justice for British Columbia 
declared at Victoria, while arguing the land 
question, that the Indians have no rights what- 
ever in the soil. Afterward, it was officially 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 119 



declared to them that though they inherited 
,the land from their ancestors, before the white 
man came, they were suffered to be in the 
lands in mere charity, and by the grace of the 
crown. In defence of this opinion, the decision 
of Chancellor Boyd, of Ontario, is quoted : 
" As heathens and barbarians, it was not 
thought that they had any proprietary title to 
the soil, nor any such claim thereto as to 
interfere with the plantations and the general 
prosecution of colonization. They were treated 
'justly and graciously,' as Lord Bacon advised, 
but no legal ownership of the land was ever at- 
tributed to them." 

The government ordered the land of Metla- 
kahtla to be surveyed as crown lands, as I have 
stated. The Indians considered this an inva- 
sion of private rights, and prevented variously 
the survey, though without any violent or 
riotous proceedings. Then, armed vessels and 
soldiers protected the surveyors, and the work 
was completed, and for nominal sums previously 
arranged, it is said, the Indian lands passed into 
the hands of white men. 

But we need not detail. Suffice it to say 
that this series of events terminated in the 
utter defeat of the Indians. Law and prece- 
dent were quoted from colonial and provincial 
New York, from the edicts of the Charleses, 



120 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



and from the hard and mediaeval times of 
Great Britian, as if oppressive usage should 
not wear away under the softening Christian 
spirit of the advancing centuries. Without 
treaty or compensation, and even without war 
and conquest, the Indians were officially declared 
to have no rights in the land of British Colum- 
bia. Being thus beggared by law, they were 
allowed but parcels of land for temporary use, 
and as a charity of which, at any time, they 
were liable to be dispossessed, under the pres- 
sure of white neighbors, or by the scheming 
of speculators, 

Bancroft, in his history of British Colum- 
bia, sums up the policy of British Amer- 
ica with the Indians in very plain words : 
" The cruel treacheries and massacres, by 
which nations have been thinned, and flicker- 
ing remnants of once powerful tribes gathered 
on government reservations, or reduced to a 
handful of beggars, dependant for a livelihood 
on charity, theft, or the wages of prostitution, 
form an unwritten chapter in the history of 
this region. That this process of duplicity 
was unnecessary as well as infamous, I shall 
not attempt to show, as the discussion of 
Indian policy is no part of my present purpose. 
Whatever the cause, whether from an inhumane 
civilized policy or the decrees of fate, it is evi- 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 121 



dent that the Columbians, in common with all 
the aborigines of America, are doomed to ex- 
tinction. " 

The village of Metlakahtla, numbering about 
1000 souls, is now a petitioner to the United 
States for permission to move over into Alaska, 
from whose border it is about thirty miles, and 
the project is regarded favorably at Washing- 
ton, and will probably come before Congress at 
its next session. 

I have presented this case with its outline 
facts and laws, in skeleton, and it must be 
confessed that it is a very ghastly skeleton. 
Two reflections will show the pertinence of 
the reference to the general topic of this 
volume. 

The North American Indians are in quite 
similar relations to the government of the 
whites on either side of the international boun- 
dary, and in substance their treatment is quite 
alike by both. The Indians usually receive their 
first practical knowledge of the government of 
white men by being forced to the defensive of 
their ancestral rights and usages. The land 
title, on which so much of all a white man 
prizes depends, and all of worth to a red man, 
he soon finds is generally and practically a 
nullity in the opinion of both British and 
American governments. Chief Justice Mar- 



122 



the Indian's side 



shall has stated briefly the Indian laws of Eng- 
land in this country when we were colonies, 
and the States have inherited, and, with modifi- 
cations, adopted the same : "According to the 
theory of the British constitution, all vacant 
lands are vested in the crown. . . . No distinc- 
tion was taken between vacant lands and lands 
occupied by Indians. . . . All our institutions 
recognize the absolute title of the crown, sub- 
ject only to the Indian right of occupancy, and 
recognize the absolute title of the crown to ex- 
tinguish that right." 

With the exception of a few parcels of land, 
and wide asunder, the Indian has no guarantee, 
like that of a white man, to the soil of his 
truck-patch and the lot of his wigwam or 
framed cabin. The land of the white owner, 
under deed properly executed, is as good to him 
and to his heirs as the government is strong. 
With the Indian, his treaty titles are as perish- 
able as the paper on which they are written, 
and often as short lived as the grass on the 
house-tops, "which withereth afore it groweth 
up.** Nor is the force of this strong statement 
much abated by the fact that often the inexor- 
able pressure of the border men or of govern- 
ment has some formality, and some simulation 
of just and orderly proceedings, when finally it 
1 Johnson and Mcintosh and Wheaton. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 123 



gains its end, and the irresistible party closes 
in on the coveted Indian lands. 

The Provincial governments on the north of us 
boasted of a kinder and wiser policy than that 
of the United States, and referred to the friend- 
ship with which they and the natives were 
jointly occupying the same territory. In our 
u Oregon: The Struggle for Possession," we 
took occasion to show that this might well be 
and continue while the great North Land was 
held by the Hudson Bay Company as a game 
preserve, and the white man set steel-traps with 
the Indians, and made social and domestic equal- 
ity with them ; but that when the factory took 
the place of the steel-trap, and civilized homes 
the place of promiscuous forest-life, trouble 
and Indian wars would come. That time 
has arrived sooner than we expected. Our 
Northern Pacific Railroad hurried the coming 
of the Canadian Pacific, and that precipitated 
the Indian turbulence and wars north and west 
of Winnipeg, in the wide and wild lands of the 
Indian owner and the white adventurer. Riel 
and his struggles for his people are sample and 
type. Now comes the Metlakahtla case, blood- 
less because they have been won to Christian- 
ity. The remaining 29,000 may not welcome 
the surveyors over the graves of their fathers 
so gently. Their future is ominous, and the 



124 



the Indian's side 



vision is not encouraging. But yet we are not 
ready to see what Bancroft does : " The Col- 
umbians, in common with ail the aborigines of 
America, are doomed to extinction." 

The other reflection weighs on us very sadly. 
With a superior civilization, and with the gentle 
religion of the Prince of Peace, we come by 
shady approaches to the homes of the Indians. 
They are graded all the way from the painted 
savage and wolfish cannibal to those of fair 
and happy homes, in framed houses and among 
tilled fields, with schools and churches and 
civil courts. In the Cherokee country of 1820, 
and in the Tsimshean of 1886, where the red 
man's style of life does not suffer much in 
comparison with that of his white neighbor, 
they are outlawed and forced from the homes 
of their childhood, the fields of their tillage, 
and the graves of their ancestors. Possibly 
paganism and savagery may work a forfeiture 
of inherited and natural rights, but will civil- 
ized and Christian men declare and enforce 
the forfeiture ? Because we are a Christian 
people, may we assume to seize the lands of those 
who are not ? Do all land titles and equity 
and rights lie as a matter of course on the side 
of those who call themselves Christian ? Is 
this seizure one of the notes in the anthem of 
" peace on earth " ? If our civilization and 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



125 



our Christianity will not recognize the natural 
rights of those who differ from us, where is the 
elevated humanity of the one or the divinity of 
the other? With all the more force these 
questions come home to the people on both 
sides of our international boundary, where 
those who are despoiled and outlawed and 
made continental tramps are as civil and as 
Christian as those who invade and despoil and 
take possession of their heritage. But we 
return from British Columbia. 1 



Section 6. — Uncertainty of Residence, and 
Indian Farming Impossible. 

With this semblance of equity we have never- 
theless negatived ultimate justice and Indian 
farming by constant changes of reservations. 
The one deep cardinal thought that the govern- 
ment has impressed on the Indian is that of 
change of home. The only certainty he has, as 
to his present land tenure, is its uncertainty. 
That old treaty phrase, " as long as grass grows 
and water runs," is a historic sarcasm on 
our Indian policy. In his tour of conference 
and observation, by order of Calhoun, Secre- 
tary of War, among the Indian tribes, in 1820, 

1 " The Story of Metlakahtla." By Henry S. Willcome. 
Saxon and Co., London and New York, 1887. 



126 



the Indian's side 



the Rev. Dr. Jedidiah Morse was constrained to 
this declaration : " In repeated interviews with 
them, after informing them what good things 
their Great Father, the President, was ready 
to bestow on them if they were willing to 
receive them, the Chiefs significantly shook their 
heads, and said : fc It may be so, or it may 
be not ; we doubt it. We don't know what 
to believe.' " 1 

The worthlessness of the reservation system 
for agriculture because of its uncertainty, 
President Jackson states with great candor 
and force, in his first message, 1829 : Si Pro- 
fessing a desire to civilize them, we have at 
the same time lost no opportunity to purchase 
their lands and thrust them farther into the 
wilderness. By this means thej^ have not only 
been kept in a wandering state, but been led 
to look upon us as unjust, and indifferent 
to their fate. Thus, though lavish in its own 
expenditures upon the subject, government has 
constantly defeated its own policy." 

This reservation theory has suggested some 
singular expedients for disposing of the Indian 
question. In 1778, while yet in the dubious 
struggle of the revolution, and when the Eng- 
lish were enlisting the Indians against the col- 
onies, we formed a treaty with the Delawares in 
1 " Report to the Sec. of War," etc., pp. 89, 90. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION, 



127 



which, under certain provisos, " it is further 
agreed on between the contracting parties, 
... to invite any other tribes, who have been 
friends to the interest of the United States, 
to join the present confederation, and to form 
a State, whereof the Delaware nation shall be 
the head, and have a representative in Con- 
gress. ..." 1 

Under a change from that policy, the pitiable 
remnant of the Delawares are down on the Red 
River, in the extreme south-west of the Indian 
Territory, and number, all told, about 80 souls. 

Possibly the elaborate, suggestive, and some- 
what seminal report of John C. Calhoun, in 
1818, had Indian States in view when he 
proposed two large reservations on which to 
collect the Indians. The southern one we 
have. The one proposed for the north was 
never formed. 

The process of force, outlawry, and ostracism, 
by which the Cherokee nation was removed 
from Georgia to become occupants of this 
southern reservation, the present Indian Ter- 
ritory, is no unfair illustration of our ruinous 
policy on Indian farming. " By the advice of 
Washington and every successive president 
of the United States, and assisted by grants of 
money from Congress, made for that express 
1 "Laws of U. S.," Duane, ii. 304. 



128 



the Indian's side 



purpose, the Cherokees had been rapidly ad- 
vancing in civilization. They had become a 
nation of farmers so entirely that persons 
extensively acquainted with them did not 
know a single individual who depended on 
the chase for a subsistence. They were un- 
willing to leave their comfortable habitations, 
their cultivated fields, and the graves of their 
fathers, and remove into a distant and un- 
known wilderness. They had organized a 
regular government, and were, to a consider- 
able extent, supplied with schools and religious 
institutions. For several years they had re- 
fused to sell any more of their lands, and had 
even enacted a law for punishing with death 
any chief who should attempt it. Georgia did 
not need the lands, for her population was 
not more than seven souls to a square mile ; 
but the avaricious part of her citizens coveted 
them, for monej r could be made by trading 
in them, and some of them contained gold 
mines. It was proposed that the State should 
take possession of the lands, divide the whole 
into small portions, and distribute them among 
her citizens by lottery." It should be here 
interposed that some years before a large 
minority of the tribe had removed under 
pressure, and with the usual Indian willing- 
ness, to the new opening over the Mississippi ; 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



129 



to compel the rest to go was the purpose of 
Georgia. 

"A law was enacted by the Legislature of 
Georgia, to take effect in June, 1830, extending 
the jurisdiction of the State over that part of 
the Cherokee nation within her chartered lira- 
its. Against this the Cherokees remonstrated 
to the President ; but he, through the Secre- 
tary of War, answered that he had no authority 
to interfere. Encouraged by this state of things, 
Alabama and Mississippi enacted similar laws 
with respect to the Indian Territories within 
the limits that they claimed. All these laws 
were passed for the avowed purpose of making 
the situation of the Indians so uncomfortable 
that they would be willing to sell out and re- 
move to the West. Success was confidently 
anticipated ; and speculators were already in- 
quiring what parts of the lands about to be 
vacated would be most salable, and making 
arrangements to supply provision for the Ind- 
ians while on their way, at enormous profits, 
at the public expense." 1 

Of course the Cherokees went over the river. 
What could be otherwise? Those three States 
combined to force them out, and the govern- 
ment at Washington confessed its inability to 

1 " History of the American Board of Commissioners for 
Foreign Missions," by Joseph Tracy, 1842, pp. 228-280. 



130 



the ixdian's side 



interpose. Always, at Washington, on the 
Indian question, the government in action is 
the sentiment of the white border, as one of 
the two parties in interest. 

Civilization, not to say Christianity, blushes 
at the record. At the treaty of Holston, this 
article was inserted by our government: " That 
the Cherokee nation may be led to a greater 
degree of civilization, and to become herdsmen 
and cultivators, instead of remaining in a state 
of hunters, the United States will from time 
to time furnish gratuitously the said nation 
with useful implements of husbandry, and fur- 
ther to assist the said nation in so desirable a 
pursuit.*' etc. In 1816, General Jackson, an 
Indian agent, gave them two ploughs, six axes, 
and six hoes, to encourage and aid them toward 
civilized life, and at the same time Cyrus 
Kingsbury, a missionary, settled among them 
as teacher and preacher. Xow they fall into 
line under military order of this same govern- 
ment, and turn their backs on their homes and 
farms and stock, and their faces toward sun- 
set and destiny. In 1880. while riding with 
an ex-chief of the Cherokees among his own 
herds, he said to me : 44 Farming is not good for 
the Indians." He had better reasons for saying 
that than any white man can conceive of, or 
any white farmer's experience can suggest. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



131 



Almost all Indian farmers in the United States 
are as those Cherokees, and almost ail their 
white neighbors are as those Georgians ! In 
1880 Georgia had within her border 124 In- 
dians. 

Still without a policy of general acceptance, 
and learning but little from our failures, with 
the Indians receding and wasting, and their 
civilization adjourned from one generation to. 
another, Secretary Kirkwood reproduced, with 
modifications, early in 1881, the Calhoun plan 
of sixty years before. He would have a few 
large reservations, and the lands finally held in 
severalty, in suitable quantity, and under sensi- 
ble conditions. The inauguration of this pol- 
icy would interfere with old home attachments, 
break up again their agricultural and civil and 
domestic beginnings, and either dissolve the 
tribes, or consolidate and locate them in juxta- 
positions where they would be liable to become 
irritating and belligerent. A general move- 
ment in this direction would possibly dissemi- 
nate a general discontent, and intensify the 
traditional uncertainty that has hitherto at- 
tended all government plans with them. If 
these results should follow the adoption of the 
plan, their advance in civilization would for a 
time be barred by their dissatisfaction, dis- 
couragement, and indifference. 



132 



the Indian's side 



Section 7. — Still Experimenting on Indian Pol- 
icies, and Invading Indian Farms. 

At the end of a century our government is 
without an Indian policy ; Mr. Dawes is re- 
ported as saying recently that "what has been 
done in the past is of no use, except to teach 
us that something different is needed in the 
future." The same causes which have, for two 
centuries, been diminishing the Indian fields 
and driving their owners beyond the Missis- 
sippi, are still working, but with an increased 
energy, and on a wider compass. To name 
any exceptions to this, as the Marshpee and 
Gay Head remnants in Massachusetts, or more 
numerous bands in Western States, is only to 
expose the inefficiency of our Indian system, 
and manifest its failure by graded illustrations, 
the oldest being the most pitiable and con- 
demning. 

It is true the Indians have not shown an 
educated interest in agriculture, but the best 
of their farms have not been improved by a 
new and white neighborhood and the example 
of white settlements. Indian farming has been 
in the advance of white immigrant neighbors, 
and abandoned when they came. Some figures 
in the census of 1880 are encouraging. Da- 
kotah has 27,500 Indians, and between 2000 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



133 



and 3000 cultivate the land. Some of these 
had begun farms, and repeatedly, in regions 
far to the east, but had been forced along by 
the white tide. Now they are trying it over 
again, perhaps for the fifth time, but always at 
a distance from the whites. Indeed, it may be 
said as a general truth that the best Indian 
farms are those farthest from the farms of 
white men. In Montana there are 19,791 
Indians, and a few hundred, much under 500, 
are in some farm interests. The Upper Mis- 
souri, the Yellowstone, and the yet inaccessible 
or undesired heads of other continental rivers, 
show what are called Indian farms under 
government appropriations and management. 
They are, however, a poor basis for prophecy, 
because of recent opening, and in advance of 
immigrants and speculators. Indian farms lie 
all the way east of them to the Atlantic, under 
the warranty deeds of white men. We wait 
with a painful certainty as to result till white 
men want those upper valleys of the United 
States. 

It is now a popular and philanthropic sug- 
gestion to try and end the Indian troubles by 
turning the 250,000, more or less, of this hated 
race into farmers. As if we had tried all other 
expedients, and hit upon this as a final experi- 
ment, we are pressing on them the choice to 



134 



the Indian's side 



work or die. The effrontery of the proposition 
would be ludicrous if it were not cruel. For 
two hundred years the people of the United 
States have been working the best possible pol- 
icy to break up the inferior farming of this 
pitiable race, and discourage them from under- 
taking more or doing better. It is believed 
we have taken every cornfield of the Indian be- 
tween Plymouth and the Rocky Mountains, 
If any yet remains, it is at a front not yet 
reached by us. There are, as yet, partial fail- 
ures of our policy of removal here and there, 
in the newer States, where a few agricultural 
Indians are to be found. They are probably 
only temporary exceptions to a final success. 
As they have already been removed repeatedly 
when white settlements crowded them, it may 
be expected that they will move on, "as the 
English villages draw nearer and nearer to 
them,'' as in the days of Philip. When now 
we propose this scheme to them, the stinging, 
humiliating, and discouraging memories of gen- 
erations come over them. Why should they 
have any confidence in our new promises, or 
expectation of permanency in a new home and 
on another farm ? 

It is said the Indian is lazy and will not 
work. Take ten counties of good farmers in 
Ohio or New England, and discourage and 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



135 



deceive and abuse them as we have any ten 
average Indian tribes, and will those white 
men, in the second or fourth or six generation, 
show themselves thrifty, hearty, and progres- 
sive farmers, crowded from New England and 
Ohio by repeated removals to the headwaters 
of the Missouri or Arkansas or Columbia ? 
How long would it take our Indian policy to 
produce the Dalrymple farm? How short a 
time to convert its thirty thousand acres of 
wheat field, minus a few, into wild prairie and 
buffalo range ? Even Indian human nature 
ought to be ashamed if our old policy would 
not make it lazy and listless and hopeless. 
Our Indian "ward" is naturally, logically, and 
honorably lazy, in opening farms in wild lands 
for the inevitable white man. Deny to these 
ten counties of white farmers any warranty 
title to their farms, or any personal and sal- 
able rights in the buildings, wells, bridges, and 
fences, and tilth, which they have made ; deny 
to them the protection of law, and the valid- 
ity of all government pledges and treaties ; 
follow 'them up with forced removals, to work 
other wild lands into farms ; do this for half a 
dozen generations, and will not those white 
farmers of the ten counties become lazy and 
listless and hopeless ? 

I have mentioned the policy of Mr. Bourne, 



136 



the Indian's side 



of Colonial Massachusetts, to limit the Indian 
lands by ponds, so that the whites might not 
change the bounds. The quaint recorder of 
the court record of this reservation adds that 
this Bourne " was a man of that discernment 
that he considered it vain to propagate Chris- 
tian knowledge among any people without ter- 
ritory where they might remain in force from 
generation to generation and not be ousted." 1 

1 "Plymouth Colony Records," Mass. His. Soc. Coll., 
vol. iii. p. 188. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 137 



CHAPTER IV. 

DO THE AMERICAN INDIANS INCREASE OR 
DECREASE ? 

The Indian question has as many faces as 
a polyhedron. It has at least ten : the Indian 
agent, who lives in a tribe, and has his political 
compaign bills cashed by being made the su- 
perintendent of a reservation ; the Indian con- 
tractor who is to supply such an amount of 
goods and rations for so many dollars ; the 
land speculator, who wishes to break up cer- 
tain reservations that he may handle their 
acres in the general land market ; the railroad 
projector, who wishes notices served on the 
tepees that the cars are coming; the philan- 
thropist, who would tabulate the wrongs and 
sorrows of the Indian, but lacks reams of 
paper ; the romantic admirer, who has read in 
dreamy Eastern bowers of Cooper's Indian of 
fiction ; the citizen friend, who sees in a ballot 
and a warranty deed for land in severalty a 
cure for all civil ills that American flesh is 
heir to ; the man of visions, who sees in latest 
and popular schemes the redemption of the 



138 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



red man ; the Christian workingman, who be- 
lieves that our holy religion is fully adequate 
to make Christians of Indians, and save the 
race from extinction ; and the matter-of-fact 
man, who asks to what extent Indians' woes 
have been lessened, and what plans are on 
hand, and what more will probably be accom- 
plished. 

Here, in the extreme West, where we are 
for the purpose of acquiring information, these 
questions press : Where have the American 
Indians once lived ? And how many ? And 
where and how many are they now ? 

Section 1. — The number of Indians in Early 
New England. 

Referring to the earliest days of the Ply- 
mouth Colony, Dr. Bacon says : " The Narra- 
gansetts, inhabiting all the territory now in- 
cluded in the State of Rhode Island, are 
supposed to have been at that time about 
thirty thousand." 1 Schoolcraft says that at 
the discovery of America, the number of In- 
dians within the present area of the United 
States did not exceed one million. Among 
the earliest estimates of their number in New 

1 "The Genesis of the New England Churches." By- 
Leonard Bacon. 1874. P. 357. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



139 



England is that of Gookin, of whom Dwight 
says, in his "Travels," that he "has left, in 
many particulars, the best ancient account 
extant of the natives of this country." 
Gookin numbers 80,000 to " less than half of 
the present New England," which President 
Dwight thinks too high, and puts the number 
at 70,000. This was for the year 1796 — 
ninety years ago. 1 By the census of 1880, the 
number of Indians in the whole of New Eng- 
land was 4096. 

In 1820, under the instruction of the Hon. 
John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, the Rev. 
Jedidiah Morse, D.D., made a visit into much 
of the Indian country, and also a careful study 
of the Indian question for those times. He 
found the whole number of Indians east of the 
Mississippi to be 120,346. 2 In the census of 
1880, they were 17,679, allowing one fifth 
of all in Louisiana to be on the east of the 
Mississippi. 3 

The report of Dr. Morse for the entire 
United States for 1820 gave 425,766, while by 
our last census, sixty years later, the number 

1 " Travels in New England." By Timothy Dwight, 
S. T. D. 1822. Vol. iii. pp. 39, 41. 

2 " Report to the Secretary of War of the United States 
on Indian Affairs.'' By the Rev. Jedidiah Morse, D.D. 
1822. P. 375. 

3 Appendix, " United States Census." 1880. P. 558. 



140 



the Indian's side 



is 255,938, — Alaska not included. This is a 
decrease in the sixty years of 169,828. Two 
things, however, should be considered : first, 
the impossibility of any close estimate of our 
Indians at that time — the number given by 
Dr. Morse may be too high or too low; sec- 
ondl} r , it must be remembered that our census 
of 1880 covers territory gained from Mexico, 
which gives us 33,306 Indians. This number 
should be subtracted from the whole, in order 
to take the census of 1820 and that of 1880 
from the same area. This will show a decrease 
of 203,134 from the estimate of Dr. Morse 
during the sixty years ending with 1880. , 

As to the remnants of Indians in Massa- 
chusetts, the last itemized and exhaustive 
report was made in 1861. 1 It is a sad record, 
and brief — "the short and simple annals of 
the poor." There then remained the shreds of 
ten bands, in all about 1600 persons, but 
among them all no one drop of pure Indian 
blood, no civil rights at the polls ; intemperate, 
immoral, and unambitious, and for the ten 
years preceding, receiving the charities of the 
State, not including school-money, to the 
amount of 129,964.37. 

1 " Massachusetts Senate Document 96." 1861. By 
J. M. Earl. 



) 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 141 



Section 2. — The number of Indians East of 
the Mississippi in 1820. 

A wider territorial range than the Bay State 
gives only the same fact extended. One hun- 
dred years ago the young republic had prac- 
tical possession of a shore belt one hundred 
miles in depth by nine hundred in length. 
Theoretically, we owned the remainder back 
to the Mississippi, with the Indians in pos- 
session. The western border of our Atlantic 
belt was skirted with the cabins and wigwams 
of the two races. By treaty and trick, pur- 
chase and fraud, the whites have come into 
actual possession to the Mississippi. Here and 
there is a " reservation," with Indians on it, 
as islands in an overflowing river with their 
trees half uprooted. It would be difficult to 
tell how many times single tribes have been 
moved, till they are now gathered, wasted and 
heartless, in the Indian Territory. In 1880 I 
found the Cherokees there, under the six- 
teenth treaty with government. Many of 
these serial movements to new reservations, 
and other changes of condition, were marked 
with their attempts for our style of life, but 
their projects were broken and their improve- 
ments were abandoned as fast as white immi- 
grants and speculators wanted their lands. 



142 



the Indian's side 



At the time above mentioned, an ex-chief 
cf the Cherokee nation said to the author, 
and with more of meaning than it is possible 
for a white man to put into the words : 
" We are discouraged, hopeless, and expect to 
become extinct." 

The original States of the Union have not 
been preeminent in this wasting of the abo- 
rigines. Newfoundland was once fairly peo- 
pled with Indians, but the last two of them — 
a man and a woman — were shot by two 
Englishmen in 1823. "In Newfoundland, as 
in other parts of America, it seems to have 
been for a length of time a meritorious act to 
kill an Indian." 1 " Between Lake Huron and 
the sea the remnants of them are scattered in 
small and decaying tribes, at distant intervals, 
unconnected, and of no public importance." 2 

The Hurons, or Wyandots. were once esti- 
mated to be 30,000. " A feeble remnant, a few 
score in number of the Wyandots, now survive, 
and are represented at Washington by an ex- 
ceptionally shabbj^ white man, who has received 
the doubtful honor of adoption into the tribe." 3 

1 " Keport of Committee of Parliament on the Abo- 
rigines of North America." 1837. Martin's " History of 
the Hudson's Bay Company." 

2 "Emigrant's Guide to Upper Canada," etc. By C. 
Stuart, Esq. London, 1820. Pp. 243. 257. 

3 " The Indian Question." By Francis A. Walker. 1874. 
P. 70. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 143 



In 1885 this ancient and strong tribe reported 
251, of whom 239 were mixed bloods, with 40 
dwelling-houses. 

The depletion of the race continued west of 
the Alleghanies, and as rapidly as in the east. 
When Colonel Henderson obtained title of land 
for that abnormal State called Transylvania, he 
contracted with 1200 Indian chiefs, and paid 
to them for their quitclaim ten loads of goods, 
a few fire arms, and some whiskey. 1 So many 
chiefs indicated a large Indian population at 
that date, 1775. At our last census the num- 
ber of Indians in Kentucky — now about double 
the area of the primitive Transylvania — was 
Mtj. It is no longer " the dark and bloody 
ground," but " the blue grass country." 

In 1820, Dr. Morse, the Indian Commissioner, 
reported the Mennomonies, Winnebagoes, Chip- 
peways, Sioux, Sacs, and Foxes at 60,000, but 
the census of 1880 puts them at 33,795. In 
1820, the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Chero- 
kees, and Seminoles were numbered at 72,010, 
and in 1880 the census puts them as being 
59,187. Once the Delawares were numerous 
and powerful, the fear of Pennsylvania. In 
the Indian Commissioner's Report for 1880, 
sixty years afterward, they are numbered as 78, 
and on the other side of the Mississippi. Dr. 
1 Abbott's "Life of Daniel Boone," p. 123. 



144 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



Morse, in his Report, page 31, states that " South 
Carolina had twenty-eight tribes when settled 
by the English," all but five of which, he re- 
ports, had even so early disappeared. In 1880, 
it had 131 Indians. 

Judge Burnet has left on record some painful 
passages in reference to this disappearance of 
the aborigines : " In journeying more recently 
through the State the writer has occasionally 
passed over the ground on which, many j^ears 
before, he had seen Indian towns filled with fam- 
ilies of the devoted race, contented and happy, 
but he could not perceive the slightest trace of 
those villages, or the people who had occupied 
them." 4 The Judge details a thrilling incident, 
and a picture of the frontier. In 1812, a tribe 
of friendly Indians came within the range of 
the settlements, near Urbana, to be safe 
from the hostile tribes. Some of the United 
States army stationed there laid a plan to mas- 
sacre them. Simon Kenton, who commanded 
the regiment, exhausted his pleas to restrain 
them, but in vain. He then said that he would 
go with them, and called on them to proceed, 
and, taking his rifle, he added that he would 
shoot the first man who molested an Indian. 

4 " Notes on the Early Settlement of the Northwest 
Territory.-' By Jacob Burnet. Cincinnati, 1847. Pp. 
390-92. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



145 



The soldiers did not proceed. 1 Ohio to-day has 
130 Indians. 

Hennepin says that when he first visited the 
Mississippi, in 1680, the Osages had seventeen 
villages ; the Mahas or Omahas, twenty-two, 
the least of which contained two hundred 
cottages. If these numbers be correct there 
must have been about 90,000 souls in them all. 
Now, says one authority, publishing in 1812, 
there are less than 1500, and he adds : u Many 
other nations were equally numerous." 2 Major 
Stoddard was the first United States Governor 
of the Upper Louisiana, taking office in 1804. 
The " Magazine of Western History - quotes 
a Jesuit father in Louisiana as saying that 
about the year 1700 Illinois had 10,000 Indians. 
Now it has 140. 3 Probably Dr. Morse was 
not far out of the way in numbering the 
Indians east of the Mississippi in 1820 at 
120,000. 

One old Canadian testimony will be in point 
here : " They have receded as a natural con- 
sequence before the progress of industry. . . . 
Unless some extra means be interposed, he 
gradually fades from existence. . . . They are 

1 Ibid., pp. 464-65. 

2 4 ' Sketches and Description of Louisiana." By Major 
Amos Stoddard. Philadelphia, 1812. Pp. 433-34. 

3 " Magazine of Western History," 1885, p. 268. 



146 



the Indian's side 



a degraded race, and seem rapidly sinking to 
extinction. ... It is still most anxiously to be 
desired that such may become our future con- 
duct towards them that a remnant survive to 
bless, instead of cursing the day when Euro- 
peans arrived to settle among them." 1 

But we have neither time nor need nor heart 
to trace out farther, in items, this decline of 
the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. We 
have followed the trail of the 120,346, officially 
reported in 1820, till they have wasted, in 1880, 
to 17,679. What Dr. Morse saw in the year 
preceding drew from him this sad lament: 
" How many tribes, once numerous and respect- 
able, have in succession perished from the fair 
and productive territories now possessed by and 
giving support to ten millions of people ! " 2 I 
cannot refrain from adding that eloquent pas- 
sage in the " British Spy," which, if very ro- 
mantic and poetic, is still more historic : — 

" This charming country belonged to the 
Indians : over these fields and through these 
forests their beloved forefathers, once, in care- 
less gayety, pursued their sports and hunted 
their game. Every returning day found them 
the sole, the peaceful, the happy proprietors of 

1 " Emigrant's Guide to Upper Canada," etc. C. Stuart, 
Esq. London, 1820. Pp. 240-268. 

2 " Report," Appendix, p. IT. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 147 



this extensive domain. But the white man 
came, and lo, the animated chase, the feast, the 
dance, the song of fearless, thoughtless joy, 
were over. Ever since, they have been made 
to drink of the bitter cup of humiliation ; 
treated like dogs, their lives, their liberties, the 
sport of the white man ; their country and the 
graves of their fathers torn from them in cruel 
succession, until, driven from river to river, and 
from forest to forest, and through a period of 
two hundred years rolled back, nation upon 
nation, they find themselves fugitives, vagrants 
and strangers in their own country." 

Of course the claim by natural right of the 
aborigines to hold these immense wilds against 
utilization in cultivation and civilization can- 
not be conceded. If one is studiously inclined 
on this point, he may find profitable and suffi- 
cient reading in Vattel, section 209 ; Kent's 
" Commentaries on American Law," volume iii., 
and Lecture fifty-one; and Wheaton's " Re- 
ports," volume viii., page 543 and following. 

It is estimated that one acre in corn will fur- 
nish a food supply for from 120 to 240 men for 
a year, while from 800,000 to 1,500,000 acres of 
wild and game land would be necessary to do 
the same. 1 The increase of the* human family 

1 " Pre-Historic Eaces of the United States of America." 
By J. W. Foster, LL. D. 1874. Pp. 346, 347. 



148 



the ikdian's side 



and its elevation in what constitutes civiliza- 
tion cannot be expected to concede to an 
Indian the sovereign control and use of 6000 
acres of land for the natural production of wild 
animals, that he may live on game suppers. 
Practically, and by some processes in jurispru- 
dence, the case becomes a new one and the 
decision is reversed when the party is a white 
Englishman or American instead of a tawny 
aboriginal American, and holds from ten thou- 
sand to half a million of acres. 



Section 3. — Examples of Decrease beyond the 
Mississippi. 

But let us cross over the Mississippi, and 
there take up again the trail of our fugitive 
Indians — " our wards " — as they strike off 
into the West. We started, sixty years ago, to 
follow 425,766 of them, of whom we have found 
only 15,366 now on the east of the great river. 
How r many of the remainder can be found on 
the west of it ? The American Board of Mis- 
sions has this remark in its Report for 1853 : 
44 It is not strange that the Indians of the 
United States, in two centuries, have lost half 
their number.*' 

We never have had, in early years or lately, 
such an enumeration of our Indians at regu- 



OF THE IXDIAX QUESTION. 



149 



larly recurring periods as will enable us to 
speak positively of their increase or decrease as 
a whole. Single tribes and clusters of tribes 
have furnished a basis for limited comparison, 
if we are allowed to use official and unofficial 
estimates in a mixed way, as thus : — 

When Marquette opened his Mission opposite 
" Starved Rock," Illinois, in 1675, " 500 chiefs 
and old men sat in a ring. Behind stood more 
than 1500 youths and warriors, and behind all 
these the women and children of the town." 
About four years later, Hennepin says that he 
counted 460 lodges there, and others made the 
same estimate." 1 

Mr. Picotte "informs me that since he first 
knew them, in 1820, the Mandans, Rees, and 
Gros Ventres had probably lost five sixths of 
their number." 2 In 1858 the Apaches in Ari- 
zona were said to have 2000 warriors. 3 On a 
common estimate of one warrior to six Indians, 
this would give the Apaches in that territory 
12,000. The government reports 9891 for their 
total in Arizona, New Mexico, and the Indian 
Territory, in 1880. 

1 " Mag. West His.," 1885, p. 315. 

2 Cuthbertson's " Expedition to the Mauvaises Terres," 
1850, Fifth An. Rep. Smithsonian Institution, March, 1851, 
p. 119. 

3 " Arizona and Sonora." By Sylvester Mowry, delegate 
to Congress. 1864. Pp. 32, 33. 



150 



the Indian's side 



"Some sixty years ago, after an inquiry into 
the state of the Illinois Indians, it was thought 
they numbered 10,000 souls. I am of the opin- 
ion that to-day there are scarcely more than 
800 or 900. 1 Association with the French des- 
troys them." 1 

In 1845 Elijah White, Indian Agent for 
Oregon Territory, reported there "about 42,000 
Indians." That territory embraced the Ore- 
gon, Washington, and Idaho of to-day, and all 
north up to 54° 40'. As only " civilized " 
Indians are entered in the census of 1880, and 
the agencies report only what are connected 
with them, a comparison with reference to in- 
crease or decrease can be only suggestive and 
approximate. For so much of the original 
Oregon as now lies within the United States, 
the Indian Commissioner's Report for 1880 
gives 16,356. Of these, 1550 are reckoned as 
not under an agent. The number of the un- 
civilized is not given ; and allowing for these 
and for any north of 49° in Mr. White's re- 
port, the difference is still very great .between 
his estimate in 1845, of 42,000, and the reported 
number of 16,356 in 1880. The statements fol- 
lowing of two agents are stimulating to reflec- 
tions on this difference. The agent for the 

1 John Watson, " Jesuit in Louisana." 1764-5. "Mag. 
West. His.," 1884, p. 120. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 151 



Grand Rond6 Agency, Oregon, says : " The In- 
dians composing the inhabitants of the agency 
are remnants of the numerous and once power- 
ful tribes occupying the Willamette and Rogue 
River Valleys in this State." This agency has 
869 Indians, the remnant of seventeen tribes. 
The agent of the Siletz agency, Oregon, re- 
ports : " The Indians occupying this extent of 
country number about 1100, and are composed 
•of the remnants of fifteen different tribes." 

We obtain a glance at the large body of 
Indians in Oregon in those early days by read- 
ing a passage like this : " Half a century ago 
they came by thousands, and the desolate 
shores were alive with them. . . . Now, only a 
few score Indians come to remind the whites 
that a remnant of the race still lives." The 
author is speaking of the salmon fisheries on 
the Columbia, at the Dalles." 1 

In 1840 five missionaries, with associates, — 
thirty-six adults and seventeen children, — 
arrived in Oregon to enlarge the Methodist 
Mission. " Not long after the arrival of this 
last reinforcement, affairs began to grow more 
discouraging. The Mission school near Salem 
dwindled to almost nothing. ... A tour was 
made in the Umpqua Valley, where they 

1 " Guide to the Northern Pacific Railroad." By Henry 
I. Winser. 1880. P. 233. 



152 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



preached to the Indians, on many occasions, 
but concluded that it was not wise to open a 
mission there, partly owing to the rapidity with 
which the Indians seemed to be wasting away. 
The station on Puget Sound was so unsuccess- 
ful that it was abandoned." The superintend- 
ent was superseded, but Mr. Hines, one of the 
authors on Oregon, defends the Mission and 
Mr. Lee by saying that " the Indian population 
had been wasting away like the dews of the 
morning." 1 

Commander Wilkes noted the same decrease 
of Indians in Oregon in 1841. " We hoped to 
get sight of the Indians of the Methodist Mis- 
sion, whom they were teaching, but saw only 
four servants. We were told, however, that 
there was a school of twenty or twenty-five 
scholars ten miles away. In a few days we 
visited the mill where the school was situated, 
but were told that it was not in a condition to 
be visited." " During my stay at Vancouver I 
frequently met Casenove, the chief of the Klac- 
katack tribe. . . . He was once lord of all 
this domain, . . . and within the last fifteen 
years his village was quite prosperous ; he 
could muster four or five hundred warriors: 
but the ague and fever have, within a short 

- " History of Indian Missions on the Pacific Coast, Ore- 
gon,' ? etc. By Rev. Myron Eells. 1882. Pp. 22-24. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



153 



space of time, swept off the whole tribe, and it 
is said they all died within three weeks. He 
now stands alone, his land, tribe, and property 
all departed, and he a dependent on the bounty 
of the Company (Hudson's Bay Company). 
Casenove is about fifty years of age, and a 
noble and intelligent-looking Indian. At the 
fort he is always welcome, and is furnished 
with a plate at meal-times at the side-table. . . . 
He scarce seemed to attract the notice of any 
one, but ate his meal in silence and retired. . . . 
Casenove's tribe is not the only one that h,as 
suffered in this way; many others have been 
swept off entirely by this fatal disease, without 
leaving a single survivor to tell their melan- 
choly tale." 1 

Campbell, in his " Northwest Boundary," 
page 133, makes this statement in the same 
line : " The whole inside of the north- 
eastern part of San Juan formerly belonged to 
a tribe kindred to the Lummies, and now 
extinct." And the following is of the same 
import, only more comprehensive : " The race, 
as such, is doomed to extinction in Oregon." 2 

1 " Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedi- 
tion." By Charles Wilkes, Commander of the Expedi- 
tion. Philadelphia, 1845. Vol. iv., pp. 352, 369-370. 

2 " Oregon and Her Resources." By Hugh Small. 1872. 
P. 14. 



154 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



Still another and more recent author shows the 
whole by sample : " One Sunday I was at the 
Siletz Agency, and, hearing the church-bell 
calling to service, went in. . . . There was a 
great variety of type apparent, for the remnants 
of thirteen tribes of the Coast and Klamath and 
Rogue River Indians are collected on this re- 
servation." 1 

In his " Sketches of Louisiana," page 206, 
Stoddard says that in the early days of white 
settlements among them " the Arkansas nation 
of Indians was deemed one of the most power- 
ful in the country, and the French, to preserve 
peace with them, and to secure their trade, 
intermarried with them, . . . who are now 
reduced to a very few in number, and live 
in two small villages." That was early in 
this century. Now the very name is lost to 
any living Indian, and is preserved in a State 
which contains one hundred and ninety-five 
Indians. 



Section 4. — Some Personal Investigations. 

Three months in the autumn of 1885 were 
spent by the author between the Missouri and 
the Pacific, and with a leading purpose to 

1 - Two Years in Oregon." By Wallis Nash. 1882. P. 
139. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



155 



study our mixed Indian and American life 
in that region. The freedom of the private 
travelling citizen, and exemption from all 
official relations which might bias him or 
expose him to any personal aims of his in- 
formants, afforded some exceptionally good 
opportunities for seeing the inside of the 
44 Indian question." An office-holder among 
the Indians or an office-seeker, a border land- 
speculator or an Indian agent, secular or 
sacred, will appreciate this statement. The 
principal informant, intelligent and candid, 
had spent more than thirty years west of 
the Missouri and between our northern boun- 
dary and Mexico, had been the most of this 
time in the employ of the government, and 
spoke four Indian languages. Questions were 
put and the answers written out at the time. 
44 The Gos-Ute," he said, in answer to the 
question whether the Indians are increasing 
or decreasing, 44 was once a very numerous 
tribe on the deserts of Western Utah and 
Eastern Nevada, now nearly extinct, — less 
than 400. In 1860, when I guided Lieutenant 
Weed's command, Battery B, Fourth Artillery, 
in Eastern Nevada, we estimated them at 
1200." 44 Possibly the Utes hold their own 
numbers, but not any other tribe, and I 
have ranged, since 1853, from the British 



156 



the Indian's side 



border to Arizona, and on the East from 
the divide to the Pacific." " The Indians 
must go. They are dying out. The Nava- 
hoes have the militaiy and missionaries, Catho- 
lic and Protestant. But the soldiery will have 
access to the reservation. The officers and 
missionaries cannot prevent it, and the tribe 
is being consumed with imported diseases. 
The Arapahoes are another case." Of these 
the Report for 1880 shows about 4000, of 
whom 712 are tabulated in the column of 
venereal diseases. "In 1858-1869 it was 
difficult to find an unchaste Ute or Snake 
woman. After they went on the reservation 
virtue was destroyed by the soldiers. 1 doubt 
if one virtuous woman can now be found 
among them. Liquor can be had freely on 
the reservation. It caused the Ute massacre 
of Meeker and of Jackson, the teamster. . . . 
From the corruption of the whites the Navahoe 
tribe is now one vast pest-house." " The tribes 
are ruined beyond all chance of hope by the 
soldiers and cow-boys and ranchers. The 
officers generally are gentlemen, and hold 
themselves above corrupting influences over 
the Indians, but the soldiers are of the lowest 
grade originally, and are simply dreadful. 
You can have no conception of their out- 
rageous conduct." " Can we in any way 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



157 



save any tribe from extinction?'' "Only 
by keeping from them the white influences 
which are now destroying them." " Would 
a fair Ohio neighborhood around save them?" 
" Yes, beyond a doubt ; and yet I do not know 
but these imported vices have too strong and 
destroying a hold to be stopped." 

The testimony just quoted covers, it will 
be noticed, quite an area, and quite a number 
of years. It agrees well with what Commis- 
sioner Walker says in his " Indian Question," 
page 152 : " The Indian tribes of the continent, 
with few exceptions, have been steadily de- 
creasing in numbers." 

An illustration to the same effect from 
Vancouver Island is in point : " It is pain- 
ful to know, as I do from frequent inquiry 
of Indians in Victoria streets, how very few of 
them outlive infancy." 1 

Section 5. — Increase or Decrease in Cali- 
fornia. 

In this historical disquisition on the increase 
and decrease of the American Indians, those of 
California have been reserved for a separate 
consideration, for several reasons. California 
had, from the earliest days of Europeans there, 
1 " Daily Chronicle," Victoria, Nov. 2, 1886. 



158 



the Indian's side 



the fair experiment of the Church and State 
policy combined to open up a new country; 
The Roman Catholic Mission had there, in 
its twenty-one " Missions," a fair and unmo- 
lested show of its theory, running through 
more than sixty years. An American border 
life among Indians had there an exceptionally 
good illustration in the extent of its range — 
having the combined areas of Xew England, 
New York. Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Nowhere 
besides, in our domain, has there been such 
a mixture of Indian, mining, and ranching 
life — each a very positive element in the oper- 
ation of a civil and Christian State. 

Therefore a better field than California could 
not be found in which to study the civilization, 
Christianization, and jDerpetuity of American 
Indians. 

The Franciscans planted Missions among the 
Indians on the coast between San Diego and 
San Francisco. There were finally twenty-one 
of these Missions, in a shore belt about 500 by 
-40 miles, and so far adjoining as to rule out 
settlers between. The first was established in 
1769 and the last in 1823, and the Padres were 
both lords spiritual and temporal. They so far 
Christianized and domesticated the natives as 
to reckon 18,683 as connected with the Mis- 
sions. These were all servants, and worked for 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



159 



a living merely, not accumulating property in 
their own right. By this policy the Fathers 
became immensely wealthy. In 1825 the Mis- 
sion at San Francisco owned 76,000 head of 
cattle, 3000 horses, 79,000 sheep, and other 
ranch interests in proportion. Their white and 
red wines obtained high repute in the East, 
the Mission of San Gabriel producing annually 
from four hundred to six hundred barrels. 
The civil, social, and " Christian " condition of 
the native converts may be seen in one passage 
from Cronise : — 

" Both men and women were required to 
work in the fields every day, except those who 
were carpenters, blacksmiths, or weavers. 
None of them were taught to read or write 
except a few who were selected to form a choir, 
to sing and play music, for each Mission. The 
only instruments were the violin and guitar. 
They never received any payment for their 
labor, except food and clothing, and instruc- 
tions in the catechism. The single men and 
women were locked up in separate buildings 
every night. Both sexes were severely pun- 
ished with the whip if they did not obey the 
missionaries, or other white men in authority. 
. . . Both men and women were flogged or put 
into the stocks, if they refused to believe or to 
labor. . . . Eminent men of science from Eng- 



160 



the Indian's side 



land, France, Russia, and the United States 
who visited the coast, and saw the unfortunate 
natives under the Mission regime, in its palmi- 
est days, all bear witness to the wretched state 
of bodily and mental bondage in which they 
were held." 1 

So in Mexico, the converted Indians were 
reduced to slavery on the land and in the 
mines. 2 Of the vast interior of the country 
and the great majority of pagan natives the 
" Missions" took no account. It does not 
appear that they explored to see whether the 
lands or the natives, far inland, were worth 
attention. When the Convention at Monterey, 
in 1849, was discussing the question where the 
eastern boundary of the young State should be, 
they were bewildered, as in an unknown land. 
One proposed a line that would have included 
one half of Nevada ; another, the whole of 
Nevada and a large part of Utah; and yet 
another, all of Nevada and Utah, the most of 
Colorado, and portions of Nebraska. Indeed, 
the vastness, the amplitude of American geog- 
raphy has always been confusing to both 
citizens and foreigners. The home govern- 
ment of old Spain made liberal grants for these 

lu The Natural Wealth of California." By Titus Fye 
Cronise. San Francisco, 1868. Pp. 25, 26. 
2 "Am. Encyc," 1875. Mexico, p. 476. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 161 



Missions, as settlements to develop the country 
as a part of the Spanish Empire, and the 
Catholics patronized them generously for the 
extension of the Church. Yet the soldiers and 
colonists sent there by the government were 
often ruffians and renegades, transported for 
crimes at home. Such was the Spanish theory 
of the civilization and Christianization of the 
Indians as practised in California. 

In 1821 Mexico assumed independence under 
Iturbide. It became more and more evident 
that the policy of California was a failure for 
either civil or religious purpose, and in 1826 
the Missions began to be broken up by govern- 
ment, and the vast wealth in them confiscated 
to the young republic. This was completed 
by statute in 1833, when the Mexican Con- 
gress abolished the Missions, removed the mis- 
sionaries, and divided the cattle, lands, and 
remnants of property among the natives and 
the settlers. Santa Anna, coming then into 
power, broke the full force of this decree, yet 
their power waned ; the successive insurrec- 
tions, or changes in parties, despoiled them, 
and in 1845 government sold the last of the 
" Missions " at auction. The domesticated Ind- 
ians suffered severely from these changes. 
They had been educated for servitude and not 
citizenship, and their conversion to Chris- 



162 



the Indian's side 



tianity had been ceremonial rather than vital, 
and they had received no training in civiliza- 
tion above the wants of their menial life. Their 
relapse, therefore, was not only inevitable, but 
they became more of an obstacle to the future 
settlement and development of the country 
than the wild Indians themselves. Indeed, 
they stood in the way of civilizing the uncivil- 
ized Indians, for they had only so far left the 
savage state as to adopt the vices of their half- 
civilized masters. They had lost the virtues of 
their wild life, but had not attained to those of 
civilized life, and would class with that refuse 
of whites on our frontiers who are the princi- 
pal obstacle to the elevation of the Indians. 

Of these " Mission " Indians, as has been 
stated, there were finally 18,683. The last of 
these establishments was constituted in 1823, 
in which year the first official census was taken 
of the Indian race in California. The number 
reported was 100,826. That was about sixty 
years ago, and by latest official reports that 
number has fallen to 16,277 (1880). The 
estimates of the number of Indians in the coun- 
try, prior to any tolerable census, must be taken 
with grave distrust. Schoolcraft put their num- 
ber at 1,000,000, when America was discovered, 
while Catlin's estimate was 14,000,000. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



163 



Section 6. — The Government Census quite Im- 
perfect, yet Shows much Decrease. 

The facts now given, miscellaneous of 
necessity, only partially official, and as compre- 
hensive as data at hand would allow, point dis- 
tinctly to an apparent decrease in the number 
of the American Indians. Of course results of 
this investigation can be stated only approxi- 
mately, since the government tables contain 
many blanks, and when filled they frequently 
have the foot-notes ; " from report of last 
year " ; " estimated " ; " partially reported " ; 
" an under-estimate, many tribes not being re- 
ported." While the twenty-six columns in the 
usual table are generally filled, except when ob- 
viously there was nothing to be inserted, as 
boarding-schools, or missionaries, or donations, 
only twenty-eight per cent, of the blanks for 
births and deaths are filled. Every tribe fur- 
nishes material for these blanks, and their 
vacancy is a serious hindrance to this investi- 
gation. In the reports for ten years, ending 
with 1884, there are 2585 blanks for the entry 
of the population, etc., yet only 729 of these 
contain the figures of births and deaths. We 
have, therefore, only twenty-eight per cent, of 
the material or conditions for working the prob- 
lem in hand. With these very imperfect re- 



164 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



turns, the average annual return for ten years? 
ending with 1884, is 518 births in excess of 
deaths. 

One of the Indian Commissioners throws a 
farther perplexity over the tables on which we 
would like to rely on the question of increase 
or decrease. Mr. Walker mentions an increase 
in certain tribes, and then says : " An increase 
of 402 over the number reported for 1871 ; due, 
however, perhaps as much to the return of 
absent Indians as to the excess of births over 
deaths." 1 

Only " civilized " Indians are officially re- 
ported, which fact may have left some to a 
hopeful delusion as to increase. For example, 
the total reported increase for 1881 over 1880 
was 5913 ; but the increase by births over 
deaths was only 350. Whence the additional 
increase of 5563 ? It is an increase of " civil- 
ized," not of new-born Indians — an annex of 
so many from the wild Indians. Dropping the 
blanket for the pantaloons does not add to the 
" wards of the nation " ; it is merely a change 
in wardrobe, and very slight indeed at that. 
Thus, in 1882, the number falls off 2219 from 
the preceding year, not perhaps a decrease by 
death so much as by a relapse into the 44 unciv- 
ilized " class. 

1 " The Indian Question/' p. 155. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



165 



A wider range among the figures may serve 
still farther to remove this delusion, for an ob- 
scurity covers them, tending to skepticism on 
what we would like to say, that the Indians are 
on the increase. The Report of the Commis- 
sioner for 1874 gives their number as 275,003, 
but the Report for 1882 gives it as 259,632. 
Here is a loss of our Indian total in eight years 
of 15,371. 

We have elsewhere quoted a government 
Report for 1820, showing that the " Five 
Nations," or five civilized tribes in the Indian 
Territory, then numbered 72,010. The Report 
for 1880 — sixty years later — shows that they 
had decreased to 59,187, — a loss of 12,823. It 
should be here added that those five tribes have 
been the favorites of the government and of 
our educating and missionary societies. 

And if one is still more critical over some of 
these figures, he may become more skeptical as 
to their accuracy. The increase in the "Five 
Nations " for eight years, ending with 1882, is 
5381. As it does not appear that any wild 
Indians have been added, during this time, to 
the number of those five tribes, this increase 
must be the excess of births over deaths. But 
the excess of births over deaths among all our 
Indians for those eight years was only 4560 — 
821 less than the number assigned by the Re- 



166 



the Indian's side 



ports to the Five Nations alone. No doubt the 
per cent, of natural increase should be greater 
among those favored tribes than among any 
others, for they have enjoyed an actual 
" reservation " for sixty years or so, and have 
been able to establish a family life. Under 
their present liabilities and anxieties as to a 
new civil status and separation and wanderings, 
this natural increase must not be expected to 
keep up its average. It is unfortunate that we 
have not complete and reliable vital statistics 
of these five favored tribes, that we might 
know what the State and the Church have ac- 
complished, and may reasonably undertake. 



Section 7. — Some unpleasant Conclusions, 

It was the purpose, in this paper, to prepare 
a disquisition and not an argument. The fig- 
ures and quoted statements from authors named 
are, therefore, left to work their own way, with 
what force they may inherently have, without 
offered inferences or rhetorical enforcement. 

We started with the government Report of 
Dr. Morse, giving the number of American 
Indians in 1820 as 425,766. We have added 
to those, on the Mexican census of 1823, the 
number of 100,826, which body, more or less, 
and increased or decreased, we took into the 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 167 



American Union, with California, in 1848. 
These two sums make 526,592 Indians within 
the present territory of the United States, 
Alaska excepted, and are to be now accounted 
for. We have cited authors to show their 
abundance at times and in sections ; also to 
show the wasting and even total disappearance 
of powerful tribes, and the reduction of others 
to feeble and petty remnants, till a half score 
of old tribes made only a handful for an agency. 
We have called attention to deficient, and some- 
times discrepant, tabulations. 

A few totals for a few years from official and 
annual reports on the Indians may well close 
this chapter. The earliest at hand is for 1866, 
when their number was 295,774 ; in 1868 it was 
298,528. In 1872 their number reached the 
maximum in official returns, when it is put 
" about 300,000." Five years later, 1877, they 
fell to their minimum reported number, which 
was 250,864. Six years afterward, 1883, the 
number had risen to 265,565, but the next year, 
1884, fell off to 264,369, — a loss of 1196. It 
will be noticed that since 1866 the Indians have 
decreased 31,405. If we go back to 1823, and 
take the aggregate numbers of the United States 
and of California — 526,592 — it will be seen 
that their decrease since 1823 has been 262,223. 
It may be well said that the numbers of long 



168 



the Indian's side 



ago were a crude estimate, and that losses com- 
puted on them will need a wide margin for 
variation. This cannot be said of the regular 
government returns of the last eighteen years, 
during which the average annual loss has been 
1744. 

As has been already stated, in the Indian 
census only the " civilized " or "partially civil- 
ized" are enumerated and reported. All others 
are unreported, and are reckoned only by esti- 
mation. The only guide offered by the Com- 
missioners, as to the number of the uncivilized 
and unreported, is that the reported are about 
five sixths of the whole number. 

According to the official reports of the last 
eighteen j~ears the average decrease of the " civ- 
ilized " or " partially civilized " has been some- 
thing less than 2000 a c year. One of highest 
authority on this subject, within government 
circles, informs the author that our Indian sta- 
tistics are very far from reliable. There are 
many and obvious reasons for this, and some 
special ones for making the statement of their 
numbers in excess of fact. Neither the State 
nor the Church can readily consent to the criti- 
cism that the aboriginal race is diminishing un- 
der their mutual care, and the error in the 
statistics is most likely to be in making the 
number too high. Be that as it may, as the 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 169 



official reports show that there has been a 
steady decrease for many years in the total 
of the civilized, the increase, if there has been 
any, must have been among the uncivilized. 
It will be a most unwelcome and reproachful 
inference, if forced on us, that only wild Ind- 
ians can increase by birth in the United States, 
while civilization, as we apply it to them, or 
make a show of it ourselves, on our white bor- 
ders, is gradually wasting them away, or is prov- 
ing incompetent to save them from extinction. 

And yet another point. It appears that the 
" civilized " or " partially civilized" Indians, tab- 
ulated in the census, are decreasing at the aver- 
age rate of about 2000 a year. If, therefore, there 
is an increase in the total of the aborigines 
within our borders, it must be among the un- 
civilized, who are not reckoned in the census. 
By estimation, this unknown quantity is put at 
about one sixth of the whole, that is, about 
50,000, as the reported total for 1885 is 259,244. 
Thus, to make the increase claimed, this 50,000 
of wild Indians must first gain enough to make 
up the loss of 2000 a year in the civilized 
259,244, and enough more to enable us to say 
that the American Indians, in their totality, are 
on the increase. It is an impossible supposi- 
tion that 50,000 wild Indians are doing this, 
while five times as many civilized ones cannot 
hold their own. 



170 



the Indian's side 



Section 8. — English Partnership in the Indian 

Decrease. 

As some relief to American dishonor, offer- 
ing mitigation without comfort, it must be 
added that the English are partners, to an ex- 
tent, in the reproach of Indian decrease. After 
the treaty of 1783, and in violation of it, they 
continued to hold, and for more than ten years, 
several north-western posts within the American 
lines, and used them as centres for stimulating, 
and honoring, and compensating the Indians to 
make war on the settlements. Following 1783, 
" the whole Indian war had been the result of 
intrigue between agents and emissaries from the 
British posts along the Canada frontier, whose 
avowed object was to check the advance of pop- 
ulation northwest of the Ohio." 1 Under their 
instigation and patronage Tecumseh visited the 
southern Indians, and for the second time in 
1812, and made "common cause with the Eng- 
lish in the extermination of the frontier settle- 
ments of Georgia and Tennessee, with those of 
the Mississippi Territory.'' 2 

" British officers and emissaries had been ac- 
tively engaged in arousing the Indians of Flor- 
ida to renewed hostilities," and Colonel Nichols 

1 Monette " His. Miss. Valley," ii., 203. 2 Ibid., 395. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 171 



of the British squadron, at Pensacola, offered 
the Indians ten dollars for every white scalp. 1 

So such merchandise was put on the sched- 
ules of commerce — the silver-gray of age, the 
flowing tresses of maidenhood, and the flossy, 
downy covering of infant heads. In his mes- 
sage of November, 1812, Madison says: "The 
enemy has not scrupled to call to his aid the 
ruthless ferocity of the savages, armed with in- 
struments of carnage and torture, which are 
known to spare neither age nor sex." 

Of course, Indians by the thousand, and 
even whole tribes, stimulated thus by bawbles, 
whiskey, and promises to throw down the 
gauntlet of war, perished miserably. 

Section 9. — Has American Christianity done 
its best to Preserve the Indian ? 

" While Protestants have slumbered ; while 
the wealthy and powerful church of our own 
establishment (Church of England) hath been 
inert ; while missionaries, reared and supported 
by British piety and by British generosity, have 
labored and died in other countries, the poor 
Indian of North America, a cast-off savage peo- 
ple, the most interesting perhaps in the world, 
have been left in the gall of our common na- 
1 Ibid., 428-9. 



172 



THE INDIAN'S SIDE 



ture, or abandoned to the efforts of a sect — 
Catholics. . . . Can we not find amongst our 
millions another Brainerd? Or have we no 
souls but for the comparatively easier toils of 
Eastern missions ? " 1 

In the wasting and disappearing of these an- 
cient and primeval races, we cannot too much 
admire the benevolence and the Christian ten- 
derness which are comforting their last days 
and smoothing their trail into the twilight. It 
is the present highest attainment of our civili- 
zation to watch and comfort the dying, till 
death come, no matter how imbecile or useless 
or degraded the departing may be. But if our 
civilization has done its best, while it appropri- 
ates their lands, and vitiates their blood till it 
ceases to flow, and spares only geographical 
names as memorials, some of its praise must be 
abated. The civilization which cannot make 
citizens out of Indians, or the religion which 
cannot make Christians out of the aborigines, 
must become modest in its pretensions ; and, 
reasoning from our American experiment on 
home heathen, it may become a question how far 
we can make a success in those lines among the 
inferior in foreign lands. If American Christi- 
anity and American civilization can do their 

1 " Emigrant's Guide to Upper Canada,'' etc. By C. Stu- 
art, Esq. London, 1820. Pp. 258, 259. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 173 



best only by easing and gracing the extinction 
of the East Indian, and Turk, and Hawaiian, 
preparatory to the supremacy of an English- 
speaking people over their ancestral domains, 
the theory of Christian missions exposes itself 
to grave criticism. 

In this home work and threatened failure, 
nothing can be charged off on the government 
as a force separate from the people. For all 
practical purposes they are one and the same. 
The national government on the Indian ques- 
tion is only an alias for the people. Probably 
in the cool, historic period which is coming, 
when old States and new, and base and border 
lines shall be blended, and the provincial be 
ruled out by the national, it w r ill appear that 
civilization and religion had hard times at the 
front, with scant encouragement from the older 
States, and the Indian and his white neighbor 
degenerated. For the good of the red man and 
of the border white man there has been too 
much East and too little West, and very much 
foreign, in the divisions and apportionments of 
our benevolent work, and in our popular enthu- 
siasm. Very likely the progressing failure in 
our civilization and Christianity to save the Ind- 
ian races will by and by be properly traced, not 
to any inherent weakness in the systems, but to 
their unfortunate administration. It is to be de* 



174 



the Indian's side 



voutly hoped that we will not be too late in the 
discovery that the household phrase, Home Mis- 
sions, means for this new and broad continent 
a power to make a nation to order. Providence 
has given out the order, and, if it is not filled, 
the responsibility must come on those having 
the management of the work. In discussing 
the Louisville Canal Bill, in the United States 
Senate, in 1836, and against much Eastern op- 
position and ignorance of the Western growth 
and preponderance of the nation, Webster, as 
usual with him, took a national view of the 
question, and said it w T as his habit to ask, not 
where an improvement was proposed, but what 
it was, Then he added : " There are no Alle- 
ghanies in my politics. " We have needed 
Christian contributors and benevolent adminis- 
trators of Christianity as continental as such 
statesmen. Some, with long and wide patriotic 
and Christian plans, have gone " from sea to 
sea," but the number of these has been all too 
small, and therefore these ugly Indian and 
Mormon and Socialist questions trouble the 
nation on its Western side. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



175 



CONCLUSION. 

We have had several epochs in our Indian 
history, but no one has come with the gravity 
which attaches to the bill that secures land in 
severalty and citizenship to the Indian. It 
gives to him three things, any one of which is 
more than all that the nation has before con- 
tributed toward his manhood : separateness from 
the tribal relation, land as truly and absolutely 
his as is that of a millionnaire, and all the 
rights, privileges, and immunities which per- 
tain to a citizen of the United States. It does 
not surprise us that the author of the bill 
re-wrote it seven times, and has given to it six 
or seven years of senatorial life. 

We indicate its leading features. When the 
President sees an Indian so far advanced that 
in his opinion he can maintain himself, and 
wishes land of his own, he is authorized to allot 
to him, if the head of a family, 160 acres of 
land, and if single 80 acres, and to each child 
of this head of a family, 40 acres, within their 
reservation. For twenty-five years no one 
can obtain any legal title, claim, or lien to any 



176 



the Indian's side 



of this land, and then the government conveys 
it absolutely to the Indian in fee-simple. Land 
within the reservation, not so disposed of 
finally, may be sold to the white settlers, by 
consent of the tribe ; and the income from such 
sales the government shall hold for the bene- 
fit of the original Indian occupants. But the 
white man purchasing must dwell on the land 
five years continuous before he can obtain a 
title. After this manner, and eventually, the 
reservation system and the tribal relations will 
disappear, but only as each Indian chooses the 
new style of life. This will come about imper- 
ceptibly ; and so almost unconsciously all these 
"wards " of the nation will become citizens in 
full. There are two marvels about the bill: 
one is that its fundamental provisions are so 
simple, and the other is that we have been so 
long in coming to it. 

The bill imposes certain grave obligations on 
the people. The government can bestow the 
land and confer citizenship, but not till the 
Indian is fitted for them and desires them. 
Here comes in a first great duty of the benev- 
olent to prepare the Indian for this step, and 
to lead him up to desire it. On this Mr. 
Dawes has well said : " The government can 
furnish money, but it cannot teach a school. 
The government can give land, but it cannot 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 17T 



teach how to cultivate it ; that must be done 
by private and benevolent effort, or not at all. 
It would be idle to take him out and give him 
160 acres of land, ignorant how to use it ; bet- 
ter let him be where he is. . . . The Indian is 
to be trained and educated, not by government 
officials, but by private effort. Teachers should 
be paid in large degree by the government, and 
the government has shown its readiness to sup- 
ply everything that can be done in educating 
them." 1 

Certain dangers or perils lie about this 
bill, and in this speech now quoted, Mr. 
Dawes says, and with force: "The great dan- 
ger with the Indian is that he will be cir- 
cumvented ; that he will be cheated, if not 
directly out of his property, yet that in one 
way or another he will lose it. The State is 
hostile to his coming there and settling." This 
anxiety seems to follow the distinguished Sena- 
tor and in an address at the Conference of the 
Missionary Boards and Indians Rights Associ- 
ations, in Washington, January, 1887, he re- 
curs to these dangers again: " Suppose it 
became a law just as we want it, what is the 
thing next to be done ? Are we to step down 
and say that we have enacted this great work 
into completion? I never knew any good to 
1 "Mokonk Lake Conference," October, 1SS6. 



178 



the Indian's side 



come from any such course of action. I am 
greatly oppressed with the feeling that it will be 
considerable of an undertaking to get the peo- 
ple of this country to feel and understand . . . 
that unless we comprehend it, and feel it as a 
living principle, after all, it would have been 
better that the law never should have been 
enacted." 

This bill can become of force in actual re- 
sults only as fast as the benevolent people of 
the land advance the Indians up the line of 
civilization, and prepare them for this new and 
citizen life. The j)hilanthropic and Christian 
associations are to lead this unfortunate race 
along in a preparatory course, till, in the judg- 
ment of the President, they are qualified to be 
graduated from their wild state of pupilage 
and enter into the individualism and indepen- 
dency of American citizens. 

In his Washington speech, Mr. Dawes urges 
this benevolent action in earnest words: "It 
is possible to lose all the benefit of this (bill) 
by indifference, or by the apprehension that 
you have accomplished it all, when you have 
got a measure upon which you have set your 
hearts as capable of working out the result. 
With the passage of this bill you will only have 
gotten the instrument, that is all. . . . We 
must understand that we are carrying along not 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



179 



only the Indian, but we are carrying along pub- 
lic opinion, which, up to this time, has been in an 
altogether different direction, and holding back. 
We are to educate white men as well as Indians 
in this matter." 

With this the remarks of General Porter on 
the same occasion were in accord: "You can 
do nothing in law, or in the practical opera- 
tions in the progress of a people, that is con- 
trary to that progress, or the public sentiment 
controlling it. It does not make any differ- 
ence what you enact in the shape of law ; the 
public sense of a country is what will shape its 
course. . . . The idea of lands in severalty has 
been for the last fifty years a pet scheme for 
the solution of the question as to the civiliza- 
tion and the Christianization of the Indians. 
It has been repeated and failed times without 
number. While Manypenny was Commissioner 
of Indian Affairs, there were not less than 15 
or 20 tribes that took lands in severalty, with 
the option of becoming citizens. Where are 
those tribes to-day? Reduced in numbers, 
reduced in morals, without spirit, they have 
been cast into the Indian Territory, and given 
small reservations there. They took lands in 
severalty. At first they seemed to progress, 
which is perfectly natural ; believing in it 
inspires them to work out its end, but just as 



180 



the Indian's side 



soon as their environments are contrary to it, 
they lose courage, and it dies, and they want 
to get away. The surrounding settlements of 
Indian reservations, where the land has been 
divided in severalty, have invariably had such 
experience as to result in petitions to Congress 
to get rid of the worthless Indians." 

We must not conceal from ourselves the fact 
that the policy of land in severalty and citizen- 
ship for the Indians is attended with no little 
peril to the new citizens. Their friends, there- 
fore, as well as the friends of a progressive civ- 
ilization, must stand by them with all the more 
steadfastness and watching and sacrifice when 
they enter on this higher plane of living. An 
experiment of years ago in Massachusetts is 
full of suggestions, and is calculated to make 
one somewhat timid and anxious over our new 
policy. 

About one hundred and fifty years ago the 
Housatonics were, a remnant quite respectable 
in number and quality in Stockbridge and vicin- 
ity. Late in the year 1749, an order was passed 
by the Legislature that their lands, held on the 
tribal theory, should be divided and apportioned 
among them on some plan and scale of equity. 
Moreover, the order in council says that " it is 
further declared that the Indian inhabitants of 
the town of Stockbridge are and shall be sub- 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



181 



jected to and receive the benefit of the laws of 
this Government to all intents and purposes in 
like manner as other His Majesty's subjects of 
this Province are subjected or do receive." 

An official of the government aided them in 
making the divisions and apportionments. The 
Indian proprietors decided to appropriate at 
first but one-half their reservation, so that they 
might have lands to grant to Indians of other 
tribes who might wish to make home with 
them afterward. It was found that sixty were 
entitled to land, and it was assigned in parcels 
ranging from ten acres to eighty. Some Eng- 
lish families had previously been invited by the 
Indians to settle among them, as farmers and 
mechanics, for purposes of instruction, and 
these already had lands in possession. 

The Indians at once laid out a common for 
a training-field, cemetery, and church lot. The 
races thus mixed in neighborhood life consti- 
tuted the town of Stockbridge, as the tribe 
of Indians was called Stockbridge, or Housa- 
tonic, and the town records of that early day 
show that the red men shared with the white 
the offices of selectmen, assessors, constables, 
and deacons, and several of the aborigines bore 
military responsibilities and titles during the 
French, Indian, and Revolutionary wars. They 
had had good training under the missionaries 



182 



the Indian's side 



Sargent and Edwards, and, with the possible ex- 
ception of the Cherokees, there was never, in the 
United States, a tribe better prepared for the 
experiment which they tried. The Indian pro- 
prietors held their annual and some special 
meetings from 1750 to 1781, and had the man- 
agement of their affairs in their own hands, 
among which were the control and disposal of 
the undivided half of their reservation. And 
yet, in less than forty years, the experiment 
failed and was abandoned, and the Stockbridge 
Indians moved off and united with the Oneidas 
of Central New York. 

Why the failure of a policy founded on land 
in severalty and the ballot and equal privileges 
under the laws ? The proprietors' record book 
answers the question somewhat, though unde- 
signedly. The undivided land was sold, accord- 
ing to vote, from time to time, to pay the debts 
of the proprietors, till it was all gone. Indi- 
viduals were allowed also, by proprietors' vote, 
to sell their private land to pay off personal 
debts, till they were reduced to poverty. The 
quotation of a few votes will make it plain. 

" Voted, that T. Woodbridge, Esq., make sale 
for the just debts of the Indian proprietors, 
who have not ability otherwise to discharge 
their debts, all that tract of land lying," etc. 
"Voted and granted to Elias and Benj. Willard 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



183 



one hundred acres of land, in consideration of 
their discharging £50, New York currency, 
debts due to them from sundry Indian propri- 
etors." Captain Daniel Nimham, " owing a 
large sum of money, which he cannot pay, 
except by the sale of his original grant," is 
given liberty to sell. " Granted to William 
Goodrich, in consideration of his having his ox 
killed, fifty acres of land." One article in the 
warrant for the meeting in 1771 reads thus : 
" To see if the said proprietors will order and 
grant some of their common lands to be sold 
for the payment of several Indian debts, who 
have judgments of courts and executions issued 
against them, and must unavoidably be com- 
mitted to jail except relieved by the propri- 
etors." And in 1780 all the common lands in 
the south part of the town were sold for the 
payment of public debts. 

These are samples of some sixty votes on 
the Indian land sales within thirty years of the 
time when the land was granted in severalty. 
We are at no loss to conclude why some of 
these debts were contracted, nor does it sur- 
prise us that white men would trust Indians, 
so long as Indians owned land. When emer- 
gencies came, they could be persuaded or 
forced to part with it to satisfy the shrewd 
creditor. The Saxon greed and schemes for 



184 



the Indian's side 



land are not new with us. It was thought best 
to mingle the two races socially and civilly, 
and yet the fatal weakness in the policy of the 
council of 1749 was in permitting that near- 
ness of the white man to the red man. Slowly, 
but inevitably, the shrewder and sharper race 
absorbed the property of the inferior neighbor, 
and so the life of the Indian commonwealth ran 
only for one generation. 

In epitomizing this experiment of the Massa- 
chusetts Colony with the Housatonic or Stock- 
bridge tribe of Indians, an author remarks : 
" The simple fact seems to have been that even 
without attributing deliberate intention of fraud 
in the premises, the natural and inevitable re- 
sult of the contact of simplicity with shrewd- 
ness, of ignorance with intelligence, of indolence 
with industry, of barbarism with civilization, 
happened in this case, as methinks it will ever 
happen — the weaker party must go to the 
wall." 1 

Mr. Dawes referred to this same adverse pub- 
lic sentiment on the border and in Washington, 
when he said; in his Mohonk speech : " I 
have been for years in a fight with western 
men, who are bent upon taking land from these 
Indians without the slightest regard to their 

1 E. W. B. Canning, "Mag. of Am. His.," August, 
1887. 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



185 



rights, or the obligations the government had 
entered into. .' . . There is an organization in 
Washington of very excellent men, but their 
purpose is to perpetuate the existing state of 
things." 

In the execution of the bill, a specific danger 
arises. The President has to do it through 
the Secretary of the Interior, and he through the 
Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and he through 
fifty or a hundred agents scattered among the 
Indians, and some of them a thousand miles off. 
If all are good men and true, competent, faith- 
ful to- their trust, and in full sympathy with 
the Indian cause, it will be well with the 
bill. But the peril to the aim and end of the 
bill is obvious when the interests of white men 
are known to be in the ascendant. There is a 
large body of men East and West, land spec- 
tators and jobbers in Indian reservations and 
supplies, who wish to have the old conditions 
continued. This bill will put all their schemes 
and usages concerning Indian lands among the 
impossibles. Thousands will be thrown out of 
employment and fortunes. 

But above all and more than all dangers and 
perils which cluster about the opening of this 
new Indian era, is the dominant white hostil- 
ity to the Indians as neighbors. This becomes, 
practically, hostility to their preservation and 



186 



the Indian's side 



civilization, with a part of the American people. 
This is recognized in the phrases, in the preced- 
ing quotations : " The State is hostile to his 
coming,'' u public opinion holding back," 
" environments," " surrounding settlements." 
This obstacle is recognized in the speeches but 
not in the bill, since law cannot reach it. The 
appeals to the people for benevolent and 
moral and Christian aid, to make the law effec- 
tive, are not too strong, are well put, and are 
recognized as carrying a force indispensable to 
success." After all, the public at large are to 
do the work. The tone of national feeling 
toward the Indian, and the prevalent habit of 
the nation in handling him, are indicated in 
two federal money facts. Last year the In- 
terior Department had 86,000,000 to use in 
caring for, educating, and civilizing the Ind- 
ians, and the War Department had $17,000,- 
000 to use in subduing them, and in holding 
them in subjection by military force. Three 
times as much for enforcing subjection as to 
enlighten and civilize and lift him out of the 
ordinary chances for savagery. These two facts 
are a measure of the moral convictions of the 
government on the Indian policy ; and the 
Indian severalty bill opens this new Indian era 
in the face of these facts. There is no lack of 
equity and humanity and Christian statesman- 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



187 



ship in the scheme, but its " environment " 
puts its success in great peril. The American 
people are hardened into discouragement and 
apathy toward the Indian by successive and abor- 
tive experiments. Even philanthropic and phi- 
losophical men are drifting to the position that 
the Indians must be reckoned among the effete 
races, as the Pueblos, Aztecs, and some earlier 
ones, who have passed from our continent, leav- 
ing only graves without headstones or names. 

More people than is generally supposed are 
willing that the Indians should perish utterly. 
Various causes operate to this : greed of land, 
a wanton, semi-civilized delight in warring 
on them, as on animals whose heads offer 
a bounty; an affected or real fastidiousness 
about Indian neighborhood, as elsewhere shown 
concerning a negro as passenger, or hotel guest, 
or occupant of a pew ; impatience with their in- 
ferior grade as standing in the way of the prog- 
ress and civilization of the nineteenth century. 
Hence the semi-serious judgment, felt by 
many more than express it : " The good 
Indian is the dead Indian." That is happen- 
ing which is not novel in the growth of su- 
perior nations and under foreign invasions. 
In the agrarian military divisions of Italian 
Rome the immigrants and new settlers had only 
to say : — " Hsec mea sunt : veteres migrate 



188 



the Indian's side 



eoloni." In our border and very vernacular 
English, this is rendered : " The Indian must 
go." 

It is not apparent that neighborhood feeling 
in our border land is any more tolerant toward 
an Indian farmer on the other side of the fence 
than it was in Georgia under the Cherokee 
experiment. Indeed, lapse of years, with con- 
stantly failing experiments, have begotten the 
conviction that tolerant and kindly neighbor- 
hood between the parties may not be expected. 
Chapters one and three, made up so largely 
from official sources, are painfully full to aid 
this conviction. But, what is more — that 
neighborhood has not yet been established, ex- 
cept in rare cases, and those lack time to show 
that they are a success. 

We have said that we are opening on a new 
Indian era, and, it is safe to say, the most hope- 
ful one ever offered to this unfortunate race. 
It is with the superior race to make it a success 
or a failure. The whites are masters totally of 
the situation, though cumbered by much which 
Indian heredity has entailed, and by discourag- 
ing antecedents, and by various adverse cir- 
cumstances and incidents now immediately 
pressingo Still, like all impediments to a good 
cause, these things are simply obstacles to be 
overcome. It is much to aid in doing it that 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION, 



189 



now, to a remarkable degree, the moral sense of 
the people is awakened, and the honor of the 
nation is under conviction, in view of mortify- 
ing failures in its policies for the Indian. And 
what is, probably, to become a strong auxiliary 
for success in this new era, is the wide and 
growing persuasion that we have not only or- 
ganized wrongs thoughtfully for this prior and 
feeble race, but we have suffered wrongs to be 
extemporized and sprung on them by schemes 
of marauding and plundering. We have winked 
when we should have frowned, and we have 
hurried away the victims under the pretended 
convoy and protection of arms, when those 
arms should have been turned against the in- 
vaders of Indian rights and the violators of 
national pledges. 

It is hopeful that we have come to some hu- 
miliation in view of what the fathers did, and 
the nation is taking unto itself some of the dis- 
honor which it has allowed belts of territory 
and sectional masses of the people and greedy 
financial schemers to accomplish. Reparation 
is thought of by many, and that is hopeful ; 
for the unwise and the unkind of the past 
always become, when discovered, a stimulus 
with good men to secure a better future. It 
is one of the proofs of the advancing civiliza- 
tion of the age that the nation is beginning to 



190 



the Indian's side 



show compassion and some sense of justice for 
the Indian. 

At this critical epocli it will not be w T ise to 
look only to the future, since true progress is 
achieved by a large expenditure of study on 
the past. The simplicity and humanity and 
statesmanship and vigor in the new scheme, 
now a law of the nation, must not divert our 
study of the one fatal weakness in all preceding 
schemes. The first three chapters of this book 
have been made quite elaborate in historical re- 
search, and perhaps to the reader tedious, in 
unfolding the mutual relations of the two races. 
We have traced their relations along the line of 
neighborhood, and among the adjoining and in- 
termingled farms of red and white men, for two 
centuries. We have also outlined the same re- 
lations in an eminent and protracted national 
experiment, to secure a conterminous if not 
intermingled neighborhood life. For the ma- 
terial for these chapters, we have not drawn 
from the resources of philanthropic romance, 
or hypothetical benevolence, or from the sym- 
pathies and aesthetics of un working though most 
humane parties. We have worked mostly along 
the hard, cold line of official records in territo- 
rial and state and national dealings with the 
American Indians. With painful reluctance 
and with mortification, we are forced to the 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 191 



conclusion, from these three chapters, that, for 
the perpetuity, elevation, and civilization of 
this race, the white man has stood in the way 
of the Indian. 

It remains to be discovered whether this 
opposition to Indian civilization has been es- 
sentially abated. Here is the pivotal point on 
which the new policy will turn for good or 
evil, and the struggle will come, as always 
heretofore, along the dubious border where 
the two races meet. 

From all that we have shown in this detail 
of official and other reliable information, it is 
evident that the power of the military forces 
and of the courts alone cannot carry the end 
sought for the Indians. If public sentiment 
on the border, where alone the question must 
become practical, and be wrought out practi- 
cally, is unfavorable, it easily can and will put 
a veto on any proceedings, whether congres- 
sional, civil, or military. In any large sections 
of the domain, the people will have their own 
way in handling the Indian and his land ; and 
the sections in question constitute the western 
front of our nation, extending in a deep belt 
from Mexico to the British dominion. No 
process of venue can remove the trial of the 
question from the vicinage of its origin, which 
is a thousand miles by five hundred. 



192 



the Indian's side 



When we have used the civil and military 
powers on this issue to their extent, we have 
exhausted the forces of the national govern- 
ment, since it cannot legislate and execute on 
questions of mere sentiment or public opinion. 
The new scheme is, apparently, eminently well 
adapted to the end sought, and it can be car- 
ried with all the efficiency which a United 
States statute can possess; but if the main 
difficulty of execution lies in the tone and tem- 
per of public sentiment, the scheme must be 
inadequate to overcome the difficulties. No 
man can be made amiable toward an Indian 
by Act of Congress, but unamiable neighbors 
make civilized and permanently settled Indians 
an impossibility. 

Our labors, therefore, to make the new Ind- 
ian era a success are narrowed to a few points. 
The work is to be done mainly on the Indian 
and white borders, and only indirectly and 
partially at Washington ; it is to be extra- 
constitutional, that is, social and moral, and 
not mainly legislative and civil and executive ; 
and it is to be wrought principally on white 
men. They must become tolerant and neigh- 
borly and patient and enduring with their 
inferior neighbors, and helpful toward unfor- 
tunate and abused native Americans. The 
bearing towards the Indian needs to become 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 



193 



like that which old States show, where all 
social and moral and educated and financial 
grades, and all bloods and colors dwell harmo- 
niously together, within limits ample enough 
for the widest choice, and so constitute what is 
called a civilized society. 

Reflections and regrets are perhaps vain, yet 
we may not be so near the end of this work as 
to make them valueless. The civilizing and 
Christianizing forces of the older States have 
been allowed to be scanty and feeble on our 
emigrating and propagating borders. The sur- 
plus of benevolent sympathies and funds and 
men have been put to the front timidly, and 
often with a crippling, impoverishing support. 
We have allowed patriotic heroes and heroines 
to depart quietly for picket duty, and a perpet- 
ual absence on small rations. If at the end of 
twenty or thirty years some of them have re- 
turned to visit only graves at the homestead, and 
incidentally to stir a holy crusade for a tier of 
new States and Territories, they have made the 
pilgrimage usually at their own costs, and out 
of scrupulously saved moieties. It is only to 
praise an eminently wise policy when we say 
that we have treated the islands of the sea, and 
idolatrous Asia, and the Dark Continent, with 
more worldly wisdom and with more of Christian 
tenderness. Now, in carrying this Dawes bill, 



the Indian's side 



so humane and so Christian for a statute, into 
our American waste places, we are baffled, and 
painfully, by the scanty and feeble civilization 
which our administrations of benevolence have 
entailed. 

While, therefore, governmental machinery is 
manufactured at Washington, — and vastly bet- 
ter we think of late than ever before, — a good 
moral and social and philanthropic public opinion 
must secure a fair chance for its working. The 
locomotives must have a good track, and kept 
clear. Indian associations will find the very best 
of causes for benevolent work in arousing pop- 
ular feeling, and in organizing for frontier field 
work. Whenever a tribe adopts the Dawes 
bill, and resolves itself into a community of 
incipient American citizens, Indian friends 
should be ready and willing at once to sur- 
round those Indians with a social police, 
and to throw over their new homes and hopes 
a network of protective influences fully up 
to the intent and tone of the bill. This 
will require agents on the ground, of rare 
sympathy and energy, and watchfulness and 
prudence, and men too who know the border 
by experience. It will be turning to some 
practical account the enthusiasm of mass-meet- 
ings for the wards of the nation, and the work 
will be quite unlike that of cheering eloquent 



OF THE INDIAN QUESTION. 195 



speeches. We must not forget how much 
most excellent legislating has been done by 
Congress for the Indians since the Republic 
was founded, and designing, selfish, unprin- 
cipled men have made it inoperative, till hope 
of saving the Indians from extinction is very 
feeble. This bill awaits the same opposition in 
social dislike of the Indians, and in contempt 
of them, and in satisfaction at their decrease, 
and in a greed for their lands. Sympathy 
with the bill and for its object must make 
itself felt on the ground where it is proposed 
to execute it, and this sympathy must be 
organized and concentrated and made perma- 
nent by well supported agencies, constantly 
auxiliary to government, and never relaxing 
watch and ward. 



NOTES. 



I. 

"The early Jesuit missionaries all write of 
well cultivated fields, cared for by the natives, 
who pursued the same course as our fron- 
tiermen have followed ever since — girdling 
and then burning the trees, leaving the stumps 
to decay, grubbing up the bushes, and then 
planting." 1 

" The Pilgrims very often send their shallops 
to the coast of Maine to buy corn of the Ind- 
ians," and they used on the New England 
coast fish for fertilizers, as the whites have con- 
tinued to do. 2 

The Indians in the region of the present 
Deerfield once took fifty canoe loads of corn to 
towns in the valley of the Connecticut below, 
which were in distress from famine. 

When Governor Enclicott raided Block Isl- 



1 The Bed Man and the White Man, George E. Ellis, 
D.D., p. 175. 2 IMdt 

197 



198 



NOTES. 



and, he found and destroyed two hundred 
acres of " stately fields of corn." In the 
French wars, it was found that the Iroquois 
had on hand a stock of corn for two years, with 
good store of vegetables, and apple orchards ; 
and the Abenakis of Maine were good farming 
Indians. 

II. 

As to the treatment of the Indians in the 
colonial East, some facts should be added, 
and they should be remembered, too, when 
their treatment in the new States and Terri- 
tories is criticised. Governor Penn of Penn- 
sylvania, grandson of the eminent philanthro- 
pist, offered, by proclamation, $135 for a male 
Indian prisoner, and $130 for a female. The 
Commissioners for that colony agreed to send 
to England for fifty couples of blood-hounds, 
to be used by the Rangers against the Indian 
scalping parties. 

Official papers in the archives show that the 
Massachusetts Colony offered bounties for Ind- 
ian scalps, — to the regular soldier ten pounds 
sterling, to the volunteer twenty, and to patrol 
parties fifty. These bounties were claimed, 
paid, and receipted for. Mrs. Dustin so re- 
ceived bounty for ten scalps, which she had 
taken with her own hands. 



NOTES. 



199 



III. 

As to the decrease of the Indians, some per- 
sonal reminiscences will not be thought out 
of place. In 1840 the Indians were abundant 
in large sections of Michigan and Wisconsin, 
and the author found it a common thing to fall 
in with them in Missouri; and in 1841 they 
thronged him at Keokuk and in the present 
Iowa and Minnesota. Speaking generally the 
quadrant cornering on St. Louis and running 
north by the Mississippi to the British line, and 
west beyond the Rocky Mountains, the coun- 
try in 1840 was alive with Indans. 

In a ramble in and about that region this re- 
cent autumn the scene is wonderfully changed. 
The Reservations have some, but those vast 
spaces of plains and mountains and valleys 
show but very few. In a saddle ride of eight 
hundred miles on the heads of the Colorado 
and Columbia rivers, and near to those of the 
Missouri, and among the Big Horn, Wind River, 
Teton, and Bridger Mountains, only a few 
squads of the Snakes and Bannacks were 
met. Where Lewis and Clark met so many in 
1803-6, and Lieutenants Pike and Long much 
later, and Dr. Whitman and companies from 
1836 to 1843, and the Oregon and California 
emigrants afterward, and Fremont in all his 



200 



NOTES. 



exploring tours, and the builders of the Union 
and Northern Pacific, and Kansas railroads, 
we have found the Indians almost as scarce as 
the buffaloes. A few times only we came on 
their tents, or the marks of their lodge -poles, 
in our dusty trail, where they had dragged 
them along on their lonely wanderings. The 
Delawares, whom the government once pro- 
posed to form into a State to enter the Union 
and sit in Congress, were reduced in 188-1 
to 74. 



INDEX. 



Agriculture for the Cherokees, 130. 
Agriculture of Indians, pre-historic, 86. 

Early, 93-4, 197-8. 
American and English Indian policy compared, 123. 
American Board's opinion on decrease, 148. 
American Board's testimony to Indian progress, 127-9. 
Apaches in 1858 and in 1880, 119. 
Ardent spirits for the Indians, 34-5, 156. 
Arkansas totally extinct, 154. 

Army costs and civil costs for the Indian work, 186. 
Army and courts alone not enough, 191-2. 
Army rule of the Indians, 44-8, 144-5, 155-7. 

Bancroft, George, on Indian farming, 99, 101. 

Bancroft, H. H., and the Indians, 120-121. 

Border civilization imperfect and unfriendly to Indians, 51. 

Borthwick's Indian hunt, 107-8. 

Bounties in Massachusetts, 198. 

Pennsylvania, 198. 
Bowles' "Across the Continent," 31. 
British Columbia and the Indians, 111-125. 
Burnet, Judge, on Indian wrongs in Ohio, 37. 

Testimony to decrease, 144. 

California and Indian decrease, 157-168. 
Canadian Dominion and the Indians, 111-125. 

Decrease of Indians in, 145-(>. 
Casenove, the last of a great tribe, 152-3. 

201 



202 



INDEX, 



Catlin's wild estimate of numbers, 162. 
Census of the government defective, 163-6. 
Cherokees, etc., in 1820 and in 1880, 143. 
Cherokee lands east of Mississippi, 58-60. 

Experiment and failure, 56-S4. 

Opinion on farming, 130. 

Progress in civilization, 127-9. 
Christianity negligent of the American Indians, 171-4. 
Christianizing, early success in New England, 18. 
Christians and outlawed Christian Indians, 124-5. 
Church of England inactive in Indian missions, 171. 
Church Missionary Society and the Metlakahtlans, 115-1 
Church work of early colonists, Protestant and Roman 
Otic, 20. 

Civilization destroys inferior nations, 45, 46. 
Civilization and Christianity of whites, how high, 124-5. 
" Civilized Indians only entered in the census, 164-8. 
Conclusion, 175-95. 

Corruption of Indians by the whites, 156-7. 
Crawford, Gen. William C, on intermarriage, 28-9. 
Custer, General, on Indian civilization, 47-8. 

Dakota, farming by Indians in, 132-3. 
Dawes on struggle for Indian land, 33. 

On need of a new policy, 132. 
Dawes bill, what, 23-4, 175, 176. 

People must enforce, 176-91. 

The success of, where, 3-8, 176-8. 
Decrease of IncMans west of Mississippi, 148-68. 
Delawares and an Indian State in the Union, 126-7, 200. 
Drake on failing to Christianize, 13. 
Dufterin, Earl, and the Canadian Indians, 116. 
Duncan. William, and the Canadian Indians, 111-125. 
Dwight's estimate of number in early Xew England, 139. 

EDi>-BrnGK Eeview on Indian traders, 41. 
Ellis. George E., D.D., on early farming, 197. 
English emissaries excite Indians to war, 170. 
English influence on decrease of the Indians, 170-4. 
English law and Indian rights to land, 121-2. 
Exile of 16,000, 74. 



INDEX. 



203 



Failure in home missions for whites, the radical failure for 

the Indians, 173-4, 193-4. 
Failure of Christianity in its administration, 173-4. 
Failure to civilize, why, 3-8. 

Farms of Indians the hest farthest from whites, 101-3, 132-6. 
Farming, Indian, 87-9, 197-8. 
Farming and Indian migrations, 125-31. 

Georgia and her claim to wild lands, 56-60. 

Outlaws the Indians, 68-72. 

Present number of Indians in, 131. 
Gookin's estimate of number in early New England, 139. 
Government a fiction separate from the people, 39, 40. 

How much can it do for the Indians, 33-44. 

Still experimenting and preventing Indian farming, 132- 
135. 

Great benevolent work of the country to enforce Dawes bill, 
177-80, 191-5. 

Hennepin on number of Indians, 145. 
Holston, Treaty of, 130. 

Home missions in Massachusetts in 1635-6, 21-2. 

Home missions too provincial to reach the frontier, 173-4. 

Too tardy, 53-5. 
Hostility of the English to Indians, 108-9. 
Honsatonics and land in severalty, 180-84. 
Hunting Indians in California, 107-8. 
Hurons or Wyandots once and now, 142. 

Illinois Indians once and now, 145. 

Increase or decrease of the Indians, which, 137-171. 

Indian and whites mixed in society, 61-5. 

Civilization of, and John Smith's Virginia colonists, 40. 

Cost of supporting wild, 147. 

Era, a new one, 188-90. 

Expelled from Georgia, 61-4. 

Fair at Muskogee, 43. 

Farmers and white neighbors, 56-9. 
Indian farming in New England, 89; in New York, 90; in 

Ohio and Missouri, 91-3 ; in New Mexico, 92 ; in Canada, 

94; in Michigan, 95-7 ; in Florida, 97-8. Notes (1), p. 197. 



204 



INDEX. 



Indian farming a pretended discovery and novelty, 133-6. 
Indian judgment on white neighbors, 40. 

Lands, struggle for, 32-3. 
Indians, numbers of, east of Mississippi in 1820, 141-8. 
Indian rights in the soil conceded, 56-60. 

Safety only in distance from whites, 38. 

In Kentucky once and now, 143. 

Number of, in early Xew England, 138-40. 

Remnants of, in Massachusetts, in 1861, 140. 

Separation of, from whites, proposed and impossible, 51. 
Indian Territory, area, population, 76; design of, 127. 

Gloomy anticipation in, 81-85. 

Government in, 78. 
Indian titles to land, and the law of nations, 147. 

In Dominion of Canada, 116-125. 
Intermarriage, 25-9. 
Introduction, 3-8. 
Iroquois as farmers, 95. 

Is Christianity able to Christianize Indians, 172-4. 

Jackson, President, on the only chance for the Indians, 3& 
Jackson, President, on reservations, 126, 130. 

Kansas, hostility to Indians in, 32. 
Kirkwood, Secretary, Indian policy of, 131. 

Land in severalty, experiment of with Housatonics, 180-84. 
Law as the protector of the Indian, 48-51. 

Illustrative case of, 50. 
Lawlessness in the Indian Territory, 49, 77-81. 

Mather, Cotton, his views of the Indians, 19-20. 
Marshpee Indians and Richard Bourne, 13-14. 
Massachusetts, hostile legislation of, 17. 
Massachusetts Indians, education of, in colony times, 17-18. 
Metlakahtlans and the Canadian Dominion, 111-125. 
Missions, Franciscan, in California, 157-162. 
Monette on border men, 41. 
Montana, Indian farmers in, 133. 
Morse, Rev. Dr., estimate of Indians in 1820, 139. 
On Indian removals, 125-6, 



INDEX. 



205 



Mound-Builders as farmers, 86. 
Mournful journey, 74-6. 

Narragansetts once 30,000, 138. 

Nationality of Indians denied by Congress in 1871, 110-11. 
Necessary for the people to enforce the Dawes bill, 176-91. 
Newfoundland, last Indians in, 142. 
Number of Indians, decreasing, 3, 138-166, 199-200. 

Official figures on their number, 163-6. 
Opposition to the Dawes bill on the frontier, 184-9. 
Opposition of Georgia to Indian elevation, 61-84. 
Ordinance of the North-west Territory, 33, 34. 
" Oregon: The Struggle for Possession" on Indian policies, 
123-4. 

Oregon Indians once and now, 150. 
Osages crowded off their reservation, 41-2. 
Outrage of drunken*ofncer on Indians, 44, 45. 

Penn-Indian treaties, peculiar, 15. 

Perm's Delaware Indians, in 1810, 17, 126-7 ; in 1884, 200. 

Personal testimonies to the author, 154-7. 

Philip III. of Spain and Indian Missions in New Mexico, 20. 

Plymouth Court and Marshpee Reservation, 14. 

Policies, Indian, all a failure down to 1874, 23. 

Pope Alexander VI. and Indian missions, 20. 

Pynchon treaties for Northampton, the Hadleys and vicinity, 16. 

Randolph, John, and soldiers to control Indians, 14-15. 
Randolph, Richard, on government treatment of Indians, 14. 
Reports and results of Indian work contrasted, 43-4. 
Reservation system a failure, 56-84. 

Reservations, change of, the ruin of Indian elevation, 125-33. 
Rhode Island early crowded the Indians, 18-19. 
Richelieu, Cardinal, and Indian missions, 20-21. 

Scalps bought of the Indians by the English, 171. 
Bounties on Indian, in Pennsylvania, 198. 
" " " in Massachusetts, 198. 
Scotch society for Indian missions, 21. 
Schoolcraft on number of Indians once, 138. 



206 



INDEX. 



Siletz agency and 13 pitiable remnants of tribes, 154. 
South Carolina Indians once and now, 144. 
St. Clair, Governor, on Indian wrongs, 35-6. 
Stanton, Secretary, on iniquity of Indian system, 29. 

Traders, Indian, the character of, 111. 

Treaties, how many with Indians, 30, 104, 105, 111. 

Treaties broken by whites, 104-7. 

Treaty with Indians limited in 1871, 110-11. 

Treatment of Indians by the Missions in California, 158-61. 

United Brethren, Mission of, ruined, 34-5. 
United States Court set at nought by Georgia, 72-4. 

Virginia early crowded the Indians, 19. 

Walker, Commissioner, on law in Indian Territory, 49, 50. 

On decrease, 152, 157. 
Wall Street first for a protection against Indians, 110. 
White and border hostility to the Indians, 29-33. 
White encroachments on Indian farms, 104-11, 132-6. 
White men the great obstacle to Indian civilization, 51-5. 
Wirt, William, on Indian decrease, 146-7. 



